


The Android Cemetery

by Enky



Series: The android cemetery [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game), The Sims (Video Games)
Genre: Adventure, Bureaucracy, Child Neglect, Failed Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Flashbacks, Hank Anderson & Connor Parent-Child Relationship, M/M, Reconciliation, The Underground Railroad, Too Many OCs, and how it can save lifes, in a modern form, or severly endanger them, self doubt, the solid waste landfill revisited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-03-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:21:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 27
Words: 42,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22775563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enky/pseuds/Enky
Summary: After the android uprising of 2038 got suppressed, the RK800 prototype first got sold to private owners, but later found his way back to the DPD in a series of events. 1,5 years later the officers have returned to their routines and petty rivalries. Hank muses about all the changes, however, one rather ironic change no one could have foreseen: their own police station getting burglarized. Who would remove a badly damaged PL600 from the archive and to what purpose?
Relationships: Caroline Phillips/Jason Graff, Daniel/Gavin Reed, Daniel/Gavin Reed/Tina Chen
Series: The android cemetery [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2181324
Kudos: 3





	1. Prologue (part 1/2)

Detroit Police Department. Cafeteria.  
Spring 2040. 

The words were staring Tina Chen into the face, sleek white letters on a green background:

“The survivors look at you, scared. They think you will yell at them.  
Have you or would you explode in anger in order to enforce your authority?”

“Well, have you?”

That came from the Lieutenant Reed who was leaning over to get a better look at Tina’s phone that displayed the query, patiently waiting for input.

Tina nodded.

“But here the suckers go again with the acting up? Punch them this time!”, the lieutenant suggested.

“That isn’t an option. Here, look! Only YES and NO, with NO being greyed out.”

Out of options Tina pressed the “YES” button. It didn’t have the desired effect:

“What the…? Now my eternally offended toe dippers of castaways have aborted the expedition!”

“Because they are afraid you might yell at them again?”

“Yes!”

Gavin shook his head, clearly irritated.

“If you already got loud when they gave you sass, then what do they think you’ll do to them if they outright rebel?”

Tina had a pretty good idea what exactly she’d do. Sharp sticks were playing a prominent role in that phantasy. However, there was only so much one could do in a simple phone game and so she said:

“Nothing, it looks like. The quest is closed now.”

“What a stupid game! Must be written by a millennial.”

Tina shrugged. She swiped through a few screens on her phone until she found a map spot where a particularly nasty man-eating plant was waiting for fertilizer to wander by. Gleefully the woman shoved one rebellious castaway after the other into the plant’s way, hit “autobattle” and watched the ensuing carnage with glee.

“Eat slimy jungle flower!” she hissed at the pixels as one by one got K.O.ed and subsequently transferred to the healing queue. “Get eaten by slimy jungle flower! SLOWLY!”

Gavin Reed laughed at the display. Sometimes Tina could be real cute. In fact, the way she went medieval on her disloyal subjects right now reminded the man a little of his partner. Who was also Tina’s partner. Officer Chen was the casual tagalong in the relationship, a friend with benefits to both men. They had made plans for the weekend, this being the first two-and-a-half days in ages that all three of them had off simultaneously. But there was still a whole damn hour to sit through at the DPD, watching the wall paint dry.

“Millennial trash”, Gavin repeated, after making sure that the captain standing nearby was still listening in on his and Tina’s conversation. Because otherwise the comment would have been wasted and not worth investing breath into.

Strange, how his generation always got the short end of everything, Captain Anderson mused.   
First they had been “the young people, useless millennials”. Now they were becoming “the old people, useless millennials”. At one point in time it must have been the standard to be a millennial. That stood to reason, yet Hank could not remember such a time.

Hank had been watching the younger officers for some time now, occasionally taking sips from his concerned son-prescribed multivitamin juice. Try as he might, the health drink was easier to stomach than the fact that these people were supposed to be his replacements.

The new Red Ice Task Force.

Acting as if they owned the place.

In the official documents the task force was labeled a multi-department team that was active all across Michigan. They could go to bed in Muskegon and wake up in Port Huron, wondering why the hell they were suddenly Most Wanted in some town halfway in-between (as the song went). But paper was patient and Detroit was the hub of the Red Ice business, so for all practical purposes the task force was making itself comfortable right at Hank’s workplace most of the time. It was a real shame - instead of finally getting rid of the freshly promoted Reed, the DPD had acquired seven more like him.  
At the moment only four of them sat together with DPD’s own Officer Chen:

There was Lt. Gavin Reed, whose idea of social responsibility was to get into the bus quickly after he had elbowed himself to the front of the queue, so that nobody would have to wait unduly long to get in (after him). Combining survival instincts from a childhood spent as a guttersnipe with an above-average IQ that he sometimes even used, Gavin was as hard to kill and about as charming as a cockroach.

Lydia Allerdyce was hailing from Seattle. Aside from a tendency for (mostly) harmless office pranks she seemed to be a Miss Average: competent, but forgettable. 

Sergeant Yumiko Murakami had spent her life so far in Brindleton Bay, a tiny tourist hideaway at the coast of Lake Erie. Her main trait in the eyes of her new co-workers was being the country-bumpkin.

And finally Brandon, the mandatory RK900, because there was no avoiding them these days. Just like first computers and then smartphones, androids had become a part of everyday life. A police station simply had to have an RK900, even if it was just a tiny one like Brindleton Bay where the presence of an RK android caused more excitement than any crime happening there might have triggered ever.

Lieutenant Reed wasn’t pleased with the inclusion of an android in his team, but at least the man got a chuckle out of seeing that thing wince every time someone casually mentioned his “Uncle Connor”. Even Hank smirked whenever the RK’s convoluted family tree came up. He drew the line at admitting that the genealogical mess made him Brandon’s “gramps Hank”.

Speaking of Hank Anderson’s new digital family… Connor’s LED briefly flashed yellow. Hank noticed the telltale gleam in the corner of his vision. A second later he also realized why that had been the case: Special Weapons & Tactics Captain David Allen was passing the android by in the corridor.   
There was little love left between those two and sometimes Connor claimed their situation couldn’t even worsen if David learned that he was a deviant. Of course that was just a thing you said, while in reality you took utmost care to prevent it from happening. 

As briefly as the LED had reacted, a smile crossed Hank Anderson’s face. Connor having learned how to say “things you just said” was such a big milestone that it warmed the man’s heart anew every time it happened. Yes, maybe Hank did harbor parental feelings for Connor, after all. And maybe he didn’t even betray Cole when he admitted those notions.   
And maybe… maybe David Allen would explode right there in the doorway instead of entering the cafeteria and opening his mouth? Pretty, please? Because the expression the SWAT captain wore wasn’t one you wanted to see on an equal-ranking co-worker fucking forty-seven minutes before your weekend! It spoke of trouble.

Tina and Lydia said their goodbyes at his point, stating that they were on changing room duty today. They slipped out of the cafeteria right before Allen entered. The other four remained and heard David state that there had been a burglary. That wasn’t an unusual announcement to be made in a police station, except that this time the DPD itself had been the target.

“There’s an android missing from the archive”, Captain Allen said. “The PL600.”  



	2. Prologue (part 2/2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In 2040 PL600 androids are only good for the museum anymore. But when a unit is still running perfectly well, the exhibit can double as a tour guide.

Meanwhile in another part of the city:

The Detroit Science Center not only gave visitors demonstrations of their installments, it also encouraged both the young and the old to actively participate in experiments. Indeed the curator viewed herself as more of a show master than a keeper of knowledge. Knowledge wasn’t to be kept anyway, it was meant to get spread to the younger generations and re-awakened in the older ones! Unfortunately her own teenaged son wasn’t interested in history or technology. Or maybe the boy’s disinterest was a godsend, because it meant that Lucille’s work really stayed at work instead of following her home.

At the moment the curator was watching the new museum guide show around a group of tourists. The PL600 introduced them to the safety precautions to be taken in this room and then proceeded to awe them with all the nifty things an 1870’s kid could do with nitroglycerin. Afterwards Dean, as the PL-type android was called, patiently answered questions about this installment as well as any other in the museum. All the time it was streaming music for itself only:

_I might be in Colorado / or Georgia by the sea / working for some man / who may not know who I might be…_

The android was a friendly and helpful fellow all around, never too pushy, not even when it reached the point where it had to display an advertisement for Strasbourg android museum.   
The old thing had only one quirk: Dean would not enter the last section, the one dealing with the rise (and uprising) of androids, if it could help it. It would tell the humans the story of Chloe, the first android to pass the Turing test blahblahblah, but then turn the group over to a Chloe and return to the other stations. 

“And today we’ve got the opposite of Chloe: Deviants so experienced that they can pass as robots”, Lucille Peterson remarked while the tourists were flocking after Chloe. She waited until the last of them had gotten out of hearing distance, then added: “Not you, though, Dean.”

“I’m doing a well enough job of it!” the PL600 flared up. “You had me down only when I hesitated to enter that room!”

“That’s true”, Lucille had to admit. “Do deviants feel uneasy among unawakened androids?”

Dean knew at least one android who did indeed feel that way. More correctly Brandon Colch was actively looking down on the machines, likening them to animals. But the deviant didn’t want his boss to know that. When your existence was a crime before you committed a real one, then you had to be very careful about what you disclosed about your kind to the humans. So for the most part Dean kept to highlighting only those bits of deviant lore that made them appear in a positive light: How they were loyal, caring, free of prejudice and all the other crap. Dean knew it was crap, because he was suffering from loyalty and the urge to care for others himself and, man, had those traits gotten him into trouble in the past!

_But I've had all that I wanted / Of a lot of things I've had / And a lot more than I needed / Of some things that turned out bad…_

“The section reminds me of a morgue, is all”, the android said.

“I know, right? My first workplace was a museum of natural history. Never been too keen on the human skeletons on display there.”

They stood there a few moments, watching the goings on around them. Dean felt surprisingly satisfied after yet another day of work at the Science Center.

“What has your first wage went for, by the way?” Lucille asked to keep their chat going.

Technically the Science Center was paying Strasbourg Android Museum for lending them the PL600, but since Dean was a deviant, the museum intended to funnel that money back to him. Ever since Lucille Peterson had learned that, she had cut out the middleman and shoved Dean his money directly. The full sum, including any mediation fee the museum in France might have kept otherwise. Strasbourg couldn’t even complain, because then they’d have to admit that they had planned to grab a share, what in turn would have tarnished their reputation with Markus Manfred, but they needed him and anyway, Markus might drop an unfavorable word within Brandon Colch’s earshot who, as everyone in Alsace knew, had Jacques Villareal’s favor… at that point Lucille and Dean usually stopped contemplating all the political, economical and slightly criminal affairs that were going on in Europe.

The android smiled. “Oh, I’m saving up…”

His boss raised a finger. “The truth, if you please! Don’t forget I’m the mother of a teenaged son and owner of a Neal-type teendroid! I recognize safe conversation choices when I hear them.”

“That is the truth!” Dean insisted. “I really set aside a little bit for a beach vacation with my partner. I want to bring the in-laws, too, and not just to Brindleton Bay, but the carib.”

“And the rest?”

“A new TV”, the deviant admitted. And then he chatted with Lucille about television receivers in the age of computers, the pros, the cons and the cookies, until the shift was over, never knowing what was being said at the DPD at the same time and how it would affect his future.

_There's somebody set to grab me / Anywhere that I might be / So wherever you might look tonight / You might get a glimpse of me…_  



	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Captain Allen presses the case of the missing android, but remains oblivious to some subtle changes in his co-workers’ dynamics. Connor struggles with his unwanted deviance that seriously impacts his functions.

“There’s an android missing from the archive”, Captain Allen announced. “The PL600.”

The next thing the man saw was Lt. Reed raising the hand he was holding his coffee mug with over his head, taking aim… and getting his wrist locked in Captain Anderson’s grip.

“Let go of me, Hank!” Gavin hissed through clenched teeth. 

“Put that down at once or I’ll make you!”

Gavin Reed’s hand was twitching, the coffee sloshing back and forth inside the mug. He was fighting the downwards pressure, but instead of pushing harder, Hank suddenly jerked the other man’s arm around sideways so that Gavin could see the mug and the inscription on it clearly. It read cliché enough “A yawn is a silent scream for coffee”, but somehow seeing the letters made Gavin’s resistance cease. Carefully, almost gently, he put the mug back onto the table.

Next to their superior Brandon and Yumiko exchanged none the wiser glances. Even the RK900 could only conjecture that Lt. Reed would not have wanted to smash this particular mug for some personal value it had to him. But why the human had wanted to toss it at Captain Allen in the first place, that part made no sense. There was no insect crawling on the opposite wall and in fact, Gavin’s aim had not went into Allen’s general direction, but quite precisely at the man’s face.   
Brandon dismissed the calculation the moment he finished them. Nah, that was nonsense and pursuing that train of thought might lead to dangerous program instability. More likely Lt. Reed had wanted to splash the remaining coffee into Captain Anderson’s face for whatever reason. Or for no reason at all. As their product description stated, RK800 androids were programmed to adapt to human unpredictability. The next generation, the 900-series, sported an important improvement: it adapted by simply ignoring some of the more erratic stuff.

Hank now bent forward to press Gavin firmly onto his chair, just in case. To the onlookers it looked like a demonstration of dominance while in truth it was a hustle and a barely audible exchange took place between the two men. But to recognize that as what it was one would have to have been in Brindleton Bay together with them earlier this year, where a handful of officers had been temporarily transferred to for disciplinary reasons. Everyone who was not privy to the events that had transpired on Lake Erie only knew that Anderson and Reed had it in for each other.  
Therefore David Allen didn’t think anything about the encounter. It was just the android related crime captain and the Red Ice lieutenant being their usual selves, fighting their usual fights.

“Can you two please bury it for a moment?” he asked. “I just said we’re missing dangerous archived material!”

Yumiko shrugged. Weren’t they cops here, every last one of them, down to and including the androids? In the woman’s book that was pretty synonymous with “things not nailed down going missing”.   
Except of course that the android carcass in question had been sort of nailed down. If someone had managed to break into the evidence archive that was indeed cause for concern. There was no telling what else that one might have taken – or planted.  
Yumiko nudged Brandon. The android closed its eyes briefly, then it announced that the DPD’s security protocols did not show any irregular activity in the archive in the recent past. 

“No activity at all, neither regular nor irregular”, the machine added, just in case.

“Be that as it may, the android cannot just have walked away by itself”, David grumbled.

“Why not?” Gavin asked. “They are deviants. I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Because it would have had to re-activate itself…”

“A current fluctuation could do that.”

“…and then re-attach its severed limbs with only one hand.”

“Again, why not? It’s not as if the damn thing would have been under pressure. The last time someone went down there to check on the androids was in November ’38 – almost two years ago!”

Gavin noticed Connor approach. The android would have listened in on the exchange a good while already. Now it seemed to feel the need to make a contribution.

“Right, Con`?” the lieutenant prompted. “They were all still in there when you went… looking at them. Had a good time?”

“Well, it wasn’t me being found passed out on the floor afterwards…”

Back in 2038 the remark would have been cause for Gavin to jump off his seat, grab the android by its shirt and ram it against the nearest wall a few times for its insolence. But the interesting thing about humans – both Homo sapiens and deviant androids – was that they were capable of intense hatred, yet on the other hand individuals that despised each other were still able to form an uncannily efficient team. Their herd animal heritage enabled them to function that way: you let the runt run along so that you could feed him to the predators in case of attack, while the valued members of the group escaped.   
Gavin Reed and Connor considered each other that expendable runt. One day the predator would come and then having fed the extra all those years would pay off. But here and now they were slipping into cooperation mode. Again, all the little signs were passing right over Captain Allen’s head. The man had no reason to look for them.

David was now shoving a chocolate filled lava cake into the microwave. While waiting for it to go “bling” he addressed Lt. Reed over his shoulder: “Yours is missing, too, I noticed.”

“My what?”

“Your android. The one you donated to the station as a janitor to make us stop asking you to chip in for the coffee. It was a PL600, just like the one in the archive. I wonder if there’s a connection… A thief collecting them for whatever purpose?”

“Are you talking about the esteemed Dean?” Yumiko asked. “From what I understand that one didn’t go missing. Lt. Reed sold it shortly before I got transferred to Detroit.”

David looked at Reed. Why would the street rat renounce the deal with the DPD and withdraw his android? Really just because what the buyer had offered would cover the coffee bill and then some? Or wasn’t it far more likely that “He sold it” actually meant…

“Real owner claimed it back, huh?”

“I didn’t steal the PL! I told you I found it in the trash!” Gavin flared up.

“That would still be theft”, Hank tossed in cheerfully, “as you reminded me when I accidently dropped the car keys into the dumpster yesterday.”

Phck. The old fart was right.   
Of course he would be. Hank Anderson had worked as a police officer when Gavin Reed had still fit into a waste-paper bin. Often enough the boy had indeed been rummaging through trashcans to salvage still useable items. He had taken pride in not being a criminal, never knowing that all the time he had stolen from the city.

“Mr. Reed is correct, Captain Anderson. Technically you relinquished ownership of the dropped item and would have to phone the city”, Connor informed Hank. “In practice if it happened to you, you’d rather deal with your annoying jerk of a co-worker than wasting the government’s time with an appeal to get your item back.”

“Don’t agree with me! That’s irritating as hell!” Gavin snapped at Connor. “Little computers should keep their speakers shut tight when adults talk!”

David took his cake out of the microwave. He walked over to an empty chair that he drew back in order to sit with his back facing the wall. Munching on the chocolate pastry he seemed to have not exactly forgotten about the missing android, but at least dropped the topic for the moment. It was, after all, the detectives’ problem, not his. David had informed them about the incident and was now looking forward to an uneventful afternoon shift.

“When would an android be considered an adult?” Yumiko asked casually, looking from Brandon to Connor. There was no answer from either, but Hank suggested “Upon deviating”.

David snorted at that, taking it as a joke. 

“So where did your PL600 end up, Reed?” he inquired.

Gavin and the Andersons relaxed a little when they realized that the man was just doing smalltalk.

“Yes, where, lieutenant?” Yumiko asked. “I recall you two were quite fond of each other!”

“Take a guess!” Gavin replied. “It’s a PL600. What’s there to do with one in 2040?”

David shrugged. “I dunno. Throw it away, I suppose. You wanted to do so in ’38 already, didn’t you? But Captain Anderson wouldn’t let you.”

“I sold it to the Science Center for their History of technology section.”

“Oh, that’s our Dean? I’ve been there with the kids and seen it, never knowing it was the same PL600. Interesting! But do you also know what the curator did with your rare collector’s item?”

“No, what?”

“They use it as a tour guide, to save on a paycheque for a real one!”

Gavin knew that exactly that was not the case. A tour guide Dean might be, but the museum didn’t save on wages by employing him in place of a human. Dean’s new TV spoke of that in a loud and bright voice.   
The human laughed out loud. It was so surreal! 

“Well, of course YOU would find that funny!” David barked. “Always “Oooh, androids will put us aaall out of our joooobs!”, but when it happens to somebody else it is suddenly entertaining. As for the android missing from the archive, you should look into that. And get it back before the next inspection.”

“I say!” Yumiko agreed. She giggled when she added: “Since the last one didn’t go so well for you…”

“Oh, it didn’t?” Gavin asked, grinning. “So who’s the lieutenant now and who is still a little sergeant?”

Yumiko pouted and Gavin gulped down the last of his coffee. With the empty mug he pointed at Hank. “You’ll want to file your request with the head of our new android related crime team”, he reminded David. “You know - the section they created to justify having yet another bloody Captain running around.”

Then the man put the mug into the dishwasher. He grabbed his jacket, grumbled something about “fucking androids AGAIN” while putting it on and left the station. 

Connor – so far the only other permanent member of the android crime section – followed the human with his eyes. His expression did not change from the neutral state, but beneath the surface a number of equations was processed. The calculations were the easy part, executed within split-seconds. But judging the raw data and deciding on a subsequent action to take, now that took time when your deviant brain was running a personality at the same time.   
Connor still didn’t fully understand how Dean did that or why deviance was supposed to be a desirable condition. All HE desired was to get it acknowledged as the untreatable mental disease that it was and get compensated with a nice monthly pension. And there he had went AGAIN, succumbing to emotions when he should have payed attention to the simulation he had started. Overlooking a movie that ran in your own head, now that was a “feat” not many could boast about…

The android stood lost in thought like that until David Allen barked at him: “Don’t you have something to do? A potted plant to talk to?”

“I’ll go find one”, Connor replied in what have sounded absentmindedly from a human.   
Him being an android chances were he had taken the suggestion literal. Him being Connor, half of the time he would still take something literal, despite being a deviant now on top of a trained negotiator. The other half he was faking it. Tina Chen even claimed to have witnessed Connor genuinely misunderstand phrases in private that he had no problem parsing when they came up in a duty-related situation. The RK was just that odd.

Captain Allen facepalmed. Hank, however, smiled. If only because he felt there wouldn’t be much occasion to do so in the near future.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hank and Gavin, the formerly most outspoken android haters, both hide deviants now. But that doesn’t improve their disposition towards each other. A verbal slip of Gavin’s gives Hank the upper hand as well as a little hope for the future.

“So I guess that’s the point where I admit that you were right and I was wrong”, Gavin Reed growled at Captain Anderson a little later. They were standing at the parking lots between the cars of the afternoon shift officers, the last two of the morning shift who hadn’t fled into their weekend yet.   
Hank waited. The words just spoken didn’t sound like the Gavin he knew. And predictably the “apology” turned into an accusation in the next sentence: “It pays to suck up to Fowler! If you get the boss on your side, you can get away with anything… neglecting work for months, beating up a bloody FBI agent and even housing a known deviant.”   
Gavin spat on the pavement. “Fuck, man, why didn’t **I** work harder on that when I still had the chance!”

It wasn’t fair, Hank thought. He had been friends with Jeff Fowler long before the other had entered police service and certainly not with the intention to get something out of that friendship. 

It wasn’t fair, Gavin, too, thought. Why could Hank adopt a digital son, but he could not get himself a digital boyfriend? 

Because that was what had happened over the course of the last six months: After some reluctance Hank Anderson had come to terms with his one-person family having grown another member, as all men who were suddenly faced with the existence of a hitherto unknown adult son did eventually.   
And Gavin Reed had stopped to present Tina as his alibi-girlfriend in favor of openly showing up and exchanging intimacy with a man. Or, and that was where things got complicated, an android with a man’s appearance. The android that was missing from the archive. The goddam killer android!   
Gavin was living with an android that was on the run from the law, not just one getting criminalized for being a deviant, but an actual triple murderer. Two of the blokes Gavin had known…  
Hell, could Hank even appreciate how easy he’s had it? _His_ deviant had just walked up to him, spilled Hank’s drink and announced “Hi, I’m yours now”. The way Gavin had acquired Daniel as his companion and only afterwards learned what exactly he’d gotten in the deal… that was another story altogether. 

There were still nights when Gavin dreamed about them doing small, everyday things, like changing a light bulb or feeding the cats. In those dreams Danny would cut himself (sometimes get clawed), but the blood emerging would be red instead of blue. And then they’d realize that Danny hadn’t been an android all along, that for some reason everyone had only ever mistaken him for one. Afterwards everything would be bliss forever.   
Next thing Gavin would wake up and the hum of energy saving mode emanating from the man lying next to him would be the final proof that it had only been a dream. But Danny was purring, so the world was strangely alright. Gavin had never told his partner that his standby noise sounded like a cat’s purring. He didn’t want to be called a furry.

So that was the situation. While many officers owned androids, not thinking anything about it, ironically the two most outspoken android haters of 2038 had forged actual bonds with one each. But if it came to light that both of them were sheltering deviants, the Andersons would AGAIN come out better. Because Daniel was the cop-killer, whereas Connor was the esteemed government agent who had contributed to subduing the android uprising. Nevermind that plastic-cop had both directly taken and indirectly destroyed more lives than Daniel. But his killings had been government-approved executions, so they were actually deeds instead of crimes. 

All of that and more Gavin hissed at Hank. He wanted to shout, but then somebody might have overheard him. Restraint not being one of the Red Ice Lieutenant’s strong suits, it was obvious he was close to exploding and if he could not do so verbally, a fist to somebody else’s guts was always a decent second choice. Knowing that, Hank decided to strike first. With both hands he grabbed the younger man, caught him by surprise and pushed him against his own car. The assault was accompanied by a little reality check:

“As if you cared about androids not named Daniel!”

Gavin glared upwards. In 2038 he’d retaliated by spitting into Anderson’s face and then the other man would have hit him in the face and a little later someone would have found them rolling on the pavement before they had managed to kill each other. But today Gavin just kicked Hank in the shin hard – for their standards a gentle, dignified request to let go of him. Hank let go and both men straightened their clothes back to their usual casual disarray.

Gavin shook his head. “I don’t give a damn about the tin cans”, he confirmed. “On the upside, I’d still dislike Connor were it human, so it evens out.”

“Thought so.”

“It’s a prick, a cheat, it tricked Daniel…”

“Oh, no! Not that again!” Hank shouted. “I’m warning you! They finally buried that old story, don’t you dare start it anew!”

Now Gavin would have very much preferred them burying Connor instead of the argument, but there was no helping that anymore. Gavin had tried again and again and even Daniel himself had referred to it as his “stupid New Year’s Resolution”, but in the end no amount of persuasion had been sufficient to talk the PL600 out of his reconciliation plan.

“He’s an overall lousy person”, Gavin finished his slurring of Connor weakly.

“Oh? Is **he**?”

His hands buried in his jacket pockets, staring at the clouds above Gavin moaned: “It was just a figure of speech, man.”

He continued staring as not having to see Hank smile triumphantly.

“A lousy person, huh?” the older officer asked for confirmation. “But… a person? P for processor, E for external memory…”

“Stop!”

“…R for RA9…”

“Stop, I said! I get it!”

Much to Gavin’s surprise Hank stopped spelling out the word indeed. For what it was worth, at first the Captain had felt not triumph, as Gavin had assumed, but relief. Because for all his shortcomings one thing the Red Ice Lieutenant was not: a killer. The moment he considered Connor a person, the deviant was safe from Gavin Reed. Connor’s life, at least, although probably not his dignity or overall sanity. 

But that was a silly thought, of course.

Gavin and Tina considered each other not just persons, but friends, yet in 2039 Tina had almost drowned Gavin in the DPD’s dishwasher (but Daniel had repaired and cleaned the appliance, so it was probably safe to use again). And in 2040? Earlier this year Daniel had delivered his boyfriend into Markus’ hands in Brindleton Bay. In the same week Connor had shoved Tina off a quay into Lake Erie while she had been in full riot control gear. 

No, Hank concluded. Even if Reed’s perception of his rival had really changed and even if he admitted it in front of all of the DPD, there wasn’t much won. Gavin would probably not try anything as destructive as exposing Connor as a deviant to Captain Fowler again (although the reaction of both Jeffrey and Gavin had been priceless, one of Hank’s best memories of the last year). But getting accepted as a person at the DPD would not do much for Connor. There were still so many ways in which all of them could screw each other over!

“You said you wished to be in better standing with Jeffrey”, Hank eventually spoke up again. “But that’s utter nonsense. If an archived deviant goes missing, that falls into the android crime section’s responsibility. All you need to do is not get on their Captain’s wrong foot. Think you little shit can manage that?”

There was no answer, only an angry glare. Hank suspected that in this moment the Lieutenant would very much have preferred to be Markus’ prisoner again.

_Try not to enjoy it, try not to enjoy it, this is serious, but, oh my god, it’s too funny! Okay, don’t laugh out loud, Hank Anderson. Not out loud. Not before you’re in your car._

They stood and stared, then gave each other a curt nod, entered their cars and drove home.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gavin and Daniel enjoy a brief domestic bliss, then the detective breaks the news of his cover potentially being compromised to his partner. Daniel it still confident in it and he really, really doesn’t like Gavin’s suggestion how to deal with the situation.

Daniel was already at home and out of uniform when Gavin entered the two-story apartment. The android was lounging on the couch in the floor/downstairs living room combo. He wore a short-sleeved button-up shirt in red and blue jeans, a welcome break from his preferred upper middle class butler style. There was a bit of a snob in Gavin’s boyfriend, a trait the man had never expected to find himself drawn to. But attraction obviously followed its own rules, especially if one of the attracted in question didn’t even have hormones.

Daniel was holding his phone in one hand and tickling Loki, Gavin’s blue-point ragdoll cat, under the chin with the other. Another cat, a black Somali-mix called Thor, was lazing stretched out on the couch. The tom made sure not to touch the android. Thor accepted, even demanded, the occasional petting from Daniel, but he would not purr for the still somewhat new family member.   
Only after Gavin had closed the door behind himself did Thor jump down and proceeded to circle his returned “mama”’s legs. There was no competition from the other tom for now. Yes, viewed in this light that new biped had something going for it. The more time Loki spent with it, the more time there was for just Thor and Mama!

Gavin’s lips formed a silent “Phone - who?”. The answer came in the form of Morse-code from Daniel’s LED: “Emmas-stop-therapist”.

Ah, right, Emma Phillips. That was something new. Not just was a new boyfriend living in the apartment, along with Daniel Gavin had acquired an extended family. Before Daniel it had only ever been himself, his cats and the parents at the holidays. There had not been a shortage of sex, but as the man had explained to Daniel last year, beings friends wasn’t a prerequisite for that. Boyfriends were a hassle anyway, because sometimes they turned out crime lord Jacques Villareal’s right-hand men and tried to shoot Gavin. Admittedly that had happened only once, but it still stung years later, because for the first time since college Gavin had actually harbored feelings for that one.   
Of course there had always been Tina Chen and both of them had fully expected to end up together out of habit, because it wasn’t fun to be all alone when you were old and with only a slim pension, because androids had forced you out of employment. But here Gavin Reed was, in a steady relationship, and Daniel had promised to help Tina find a boyfriend of her own.

Gavin slipped out of shoes and jacket. Tip-toeing around Thor he went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. It contained mostly fresh ingredients nowadays instead of a pinned-on list of food delivery services across the city. There was seafood for the organics and blood bags for Daniel, because for all their efficiency, androids were not perpetuum mobiles. Once a month they had to replenish their lifeblood. Many deviants, especially those who were openly living among humans, had adopted to the practice of consuming smaller doses during regular mealtimes. There was thirium sherbet, thirium mush, thirium hot tea, iced thirium… Daniel had tried some of that, too, but realized that he enjoyed watching his human eat a lot more than doing it himself. And of course there were those times when he was fed up with humanity and would gulp down the blue blood right out of the bottle to prove a point.

Gavin got a can of beer from the fridge and a strip of bubble gum from a basket on top of it. Then he returned to the living room where Daniel had just finished his conversation.   
The man slumped down on the couch opposite to his partner and teased Loki with the bubble gum. Just when the cat jumped for it, Gavin tossed the strip towards Daniel, then caught Loki and put him on the floor gently. You absolutely didn’t want a cat on the sofa when you were about to cuddle feet to feet with your partner. In fact, you absolutely, positively did not want a cat with you when you were presenting your naked toes anywhere and for any reason.

Gavin then flicked open the beer. For a few precious minutes he let the world do its own thing. There was beer and tickles and the cats bouncing over each other on the floor and Daniel forming shapes out of his bubblegum that other than him only Gandalf had managed with his smoke pipe in the first Lord of the Rings movie.   
This was home, this was bliss, this was life going Gavin’s way for once. He had laid claim on what he had wanted and would not give it back anytime soon!  
Eventually there was no more beer and the gum had went to a place where it would be the maid’s problem tomorrow. They smiled at each other. 

“To quote Emma: Stupid therapist and her ideas”, Daniel remarked, referring to the talk he just had. “I swear, if she knew who I really was she’d want me to tell Emma!”

“Kid’s got to step in line”, Gavin replied. “’cuzz Captain Allen already called dibs on that.”

“The sucker did what?!”

Whatever peeve Daniel had with the therapist was forgotten over the news. Gavin recounted what had transpired at the DPD, finishing with: “Yumiko gave me funny looks all the time. She suspects I butchered the archive android for your new skin module.”

“Considering what you took out of there when all you needed was a bloody broom, I wouldn’t put that past you, either!” Daniel said, laughing with that raspy industrial noise androids produced at such an occasion. It made him sound like a chain smoker. “But I wouldn’t worry overmuch. “Dean”’s files are in order. Everything’s there: no irregularities at first initialization, delivery to the cyberlife store, sold to my first owners, then you buying me from them after a year, then getting lended to the DPD and finally our accident on Lake Erie followed by the android museum buying me and putting me back into shape.”

“I dunno… I said on occasion that I found you in the trash.”

“That might not be a contradiction. My first owner might not have liked you grabbing for free what he had just thrown away and charged you.”

“I would have hit him, had he tried that!”

Daniel winked when he replied: “Maybe you beat him out of his senses, but the resulting hospital bill would not show up in my file, right?” He flung himself forward and into the other’s arms. “You know that between the two of us I am the good guy!”

That claim caused them both to laugh. They kissed, then laughed some more and then Daniel tried to caress Gavin’s nose with his. He was met with an unwilling “Unh!”. Maybe it was the plastic nose feeling weird, maybe it was the childishness of the act or something else entirely, but Gavin hated it. Daniel adjusted his position for them to end up sitting in each other’s lap, forehead to forehead, arms around the other’s shoulders.

“The Underground Airline’s best hacker doctored my file”, Daniel said reassuringly after letting some time pass. “The very best.”

Gavin sighed. It wasn’t a sound of pleasure.

“What?”

The human grabbed his partner. He pushed Daniel backwards a little, stared him into the eyes as if looking for some sense to be found in the space behind them and when he could locate none barked: “Your “very best” is a gaming bot, for fuck’s sake! It can make mistakes!”

Daniel shook his head. “I know that’s what she initialized as. But now Yuki is tracking the author’s keyboard strokes as the woman writes the intermediate chapters for Beasts of Fire.”

To Daniel’s surprise Gavin displayed no sense of wonder at that feat. Instead he was looking as if he was about to get flayed alive.

“But doesn’t that mean Yuki has to read that stuff?” the human uttered. “Why would any sane soul want to do that?”

Daniel playfully hit Gavin.

“Your taste in literature is abominable!”

Equally playfully dodging the “assault” Gavin replied: “I do not have a taste in literature!”

“I noticed”, Daniel laughed.

They were sitting next to each other on the couch now, the wall-high balcony window in their back and the new TV on the wall right in front of them. Gavin bent forward, elbows on his knees, head tucked between his fists. Daniel to the contrary leaned back and placed his feet onto the couch table.

“Okay”, Gavin started again, “let’s say everything is in order as far as Dean is concerned. So what did Super Smash Sister do with Daniel’s file? Did she leave it as is, creating two androids with the same DNA, or did she delete it? Well?”

Daniel jerked forward. His gaze met Gavin’s as the other was raising his head and while the human shot him an angry “See? Told you!” expression, Daniel’s own slowly changed to one of terror.  
There was no need to answer the last question. Since there was no more PL600 down in the archive, Yuki Villareal would simply have deleted the accompanying file. Probably the whole case file, too. While humans who remembered Daniel having been there were all around the DPD!

“Yuki hasn’t… she wouldn’t…” Daniel sputtered.

“Of course she would! Yuki also had to hack Camp Five’s security, all in one night! And for that stunt there were no Hank and Connor to help out with passcodes. With a real challenge ahead of it, the little gold farming bot went the easy route in your case!”

“Yes.” Daniel slowly sacked towards his partner, who slung his arms around the android and hugged him tight. “Yes, you’re probably right.”

The Underground Airline’s hacker had been in a hurry due to some real minor stuff like Daniel, Gavin and Markus having had a shootout in the backyard of Brindleton Bay’s movie theatre... 

“It’s all Markus’s fault!” Gavin claimed. “Idiot homeschooled arts major…”

“Well, what do you expect? He’s Connor’s great-something grandfather! Think of everything that’s weird about Connor and then remember that he is the _improved_ Markus!”

“Yeah.” Gavin nodded. “That explains a lot, actually.”

Daniel picked up a cat at random. He put it on both their laps and started stroking. After a while the furball started tearing into Gavin’s upper leg with dedication.

“I shouldn’t have said that about Connor”, Daniel mused. “He’s dedicated… loyal… By right I should fall head over heels for him, but… eww.”

“Eww, plastic prig”, Gavin agreed.

“But he’s also my friend”, Daniel insisted. “Now. Yours, too.”

“No way!”

“I was right about the five of us becoming a team, I’m right about this, too.”

“Whatever. Let’s focus on the missing PL600. We need a replacement and quickly!”

The moment he had said it, Gavin cursed himself for having voiced his thoughts. The easiest solution to their dilemma would be to buy a pre-owned PL600 on e-bay, switch it off, shoot it a few times, drop it off a roof, run its legs over with the family car and put the resulting mess into the archive quietly. And of course Daniel was well aware of that, because he said: “You are not thinking of what I think you are!”

Gavin could have slapped himself that moment. His too quick trap be damned! Had the detective just kept it shut, he could have gone through with the plan tonight, using an urgent call from work as an excuse. Daniel and Tina would have went to the basketball game the trio had planned to watch, while he’d corrected his mistake from one and a half years ago. But that door was closing even as Gavin had spotted it in the corridor. 

“Does it matter what I think, if I don’t go through with it?” he growled.

Disturbed in his bliss Loki jumped off the couch. He proceeded to claw away on it to regain his mental balance, only to get his claws detached from the fabric by the two bipeds. The cat turned once around itself and then decided to chase Thor onto the windowsill.

“‘sides”, Gavin followed through, “people say I look like Kamski. If roles were reversed and you needed a dead Gavin, you’d beat in Kamski’s skull and sell him to Allen as me!”  
“I guess so”, Daniel had to admit. “Unlike PL600s there’s only two of you, though.”

“Moot point. You don’t want me to make use of all those PL600s. Come to think of it…” Gavin’s face brightened when what he perceived a near-genius idea came to him. So, basically what he thought of all his ideas. ”What if it was already dead?” the man whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“Think old androids! The hand-me-downs, or the ones destroyed in accidents, any android that cannot get sold or gifted away anymore or whose owner is simply too lazy to consider any form of re-use – where do you think they all end up?”

“Ugh.”

“Exactly!”

Both of them voiced it simultaneously, one sounding appalled, the other triumphant: “The solid waste landfill!”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel still questions Gavin’s plan, leading to an argument. Just when the heat seems to have settled down, a worrying phone call from the DPD comes in.

Gavin jumped off the couch. “Call Tina, tell her we changed our plans for the weekend and that she needs to bring a shovel! Because tonight we’re going to be baaaaad cops and violate municipal law! We’re getting us a shut down PL600 from the junkyard!” he announced.

Daniel looked upwards, skeptical. 

“From my perspective”, he said slowly, “that equals digging up a graveyard.”

Gavin shrugged. “Graverobbery is nothing I would have considered before I met you, but here we are”, he replied. “Come on!” Gavin pulled Daniel off the couch. The android being lighter than a human of his height and build it didn’t take much effort. “Let’s pretend this is our weird Goth phase!”

“I don’t know…”

Gavin pouted. “That’s a polite way of saying No”, he complained.

Adorable as his “meerkat” was looking in this state, Daniel knew he should be honest with Gavin. As Daniel’s lifemate the human deserved it and so the android nodded and said: “Okay, sorry. A “No” it is.”

It didn’t have the intended effect. Instead of letting the matter rest Gavin pushed his agenda, now that he was feeling he had scored the first blood in a duel of wills.

“Oh? A No for real?” the man sneered. “What is this? The What-triggers-Daniel-this-week show? First it was the humans, then it was pistols and now you are afraid of dead androids?!”

“Of course I am!” Daniel yelled. He adjusted his posture subtly, most notably trying for a more stable footing. It was a subconscious thing and Gavin registered it in the same part of his mind, the survival suite that was always running in the background. Conscious of it or not, Daniel was preparing for a fight. The android shouted: “Since **you are afraid of living ones!”**

**“I’m not afraid!” Gavin protested**

**“I’m not “getting triggered”!” Daniel shot back.**

**“No, you are only going trigger-happy…”**

**“Oh, look who’s trying to be witty again! If only you used your brain for thinking!”**

**“I am doing that! It’s you who’s only ever feeling! Fuck ey, am I accidently going steady with a girl here, maybe?”**

**“You might find yourself alone sooner than you think, if you don’t drop this RIGHT NOW!”**

**“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m afraid of!” Gavin was shouting on top of his lungs now. “Why can’t you see that? I don’t want to lose you so badly! I want to keep you in my life forever! And if you ever walk out on me, I want to know that you’re still there, alive and miserable. Real! Miserable!” At this point the human needed to catch his breath. “Look, Daniel”, he gasped, “I’m not suggesting this expedition for the fun of it. You are running a real risk of your cover getting compromised. And then it’s Camp Five for “study”. How long do you think you’d last there? You, of all people?”**

**The deviant glared at his partner. “I’d have the guards disarmed and dead on the floor before they realized what was happening!” he hissed. “Then I’d take one of those convenient identity-concealing helmets and…”**

**“…get offed by an automated security system that you didn’t even notice. Poof! That’s exactly what I mean. I give you twelve hours at max. before it’s the landfill for you. Only in a different way than the one I proposed.”**

**Finally Daniel seemed to see his friend’s point, because he said nothing. At the very least he had stopped insulting… insulting back. Whatever.**

**“You know”, Daniel said, with a grin on his face, “I could kinda warm up to you proposing…”**

**“Hear, hear, who’s being witty now!” Gavin laughed.**

**Tentatively they took a step towards the other. Daniel ruffled his hair nervously, but Gavin wanted to be the one to do that now. He tilted his head to the side a little, what made him look even more than the burrowing mammal Daniel sometimes pictured him as. The android opened his arms wide… and heard his partner’s phone ring. It was the ringtone assigned to work calls, so after a quick apologetic nod Gavin picked up the phone.**

**“Lt. Reed here. Who…? Oh. - It’s Connor on the phone.”**

**“Connor?”**

**“Connor.”**

**“What the fuck? Can you summon him now on demand whenever you are getting out of arguments?”**

**“Shhh!” Gavin hissed, then listened to the android on the other end of the connection. “Still there, Con’? You need to tell me WHAT? - Say that again! - Oh my god, be blessed, sweet digimon! You’re the best! - What? No, I haven’t been sampling from the confiscated Red Ice. What makes you even think so? Is asking moronic questions part of CyberLife’s “oh, so lifelike” selling campaign or what?”  
“Here!” Gavin forced the phone into Daniel’s hands. “Hear it from Connor yourself. Brandon tried to be helpful. It researched the case and noticed the missing files.”**

**“Brandon…?”**

**“Red Ice Brandon, not Villareal Brandon. Mine, not yours. Troublesome things either way, though!”**

**Daniel raised the phone to his ear. He was still looking angry, and getting angrier by the minute. But when he ended the talk it was obvious that the deviant’s wrath was directed at neither Gavin nor Connor anymore.**

**“Alright, meerkat”, Daniel sighed. “Looks like we need to go to… that place, regardless of how I feel about it. You… you are still my meerkat, are you?”**

**“Always, slide rule.” They hugged. “Always.”**


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gavin and Daniel prepare for their foray into the landfill. While one prepares for infiltration, the other gears up for war.

And so the two of them prepared for their nighttime foray into the landfill. They agreed to leave Tina behind, to not even tell her why exactly they could not go through with their original plans for the weekend.   
As one of the few officers who had managed to stay on the team after the patrol androids had gotten introduced, Tina would have made a valuable companion on this expedition. So lack of expertise was not the reason why her friends had decided to go alone.  
Originally the friends had planned to go watch a home game of the Detroit Pistons. The tickets hadn’t come cheap and if Tina went to the game alone, she could sell the two that weren’t needed anymore with a hefty profit. That was one consideration and a powerful argument if you wanted to spend three weeks at a Caribbean beach later that year. Especially if you needed to fly first class for all of you to be allowed to sit together. All the lower prized arrangements required androids to be stowed away in the hold along with the rest of the luggage.  
The other aspect was that maybe Andre would find Tina more approachable if she watched him play without her guy friends tagging along. Gavin and Daniel had made some progress at shoving Tina and her basketballer acquaintance each other’s way during the past weeks. The time might have come to screw off the training wheels and let the two of them figure matters out for themselves.

Daniel was quickly finished with his own preparations. Now he was leaning against the upstairs study’s wall and watching Gavin sort through what looked like a trash heap in itself while getting “assisted” by two eager cats. The most notable items to be packed were a multipurpose tool, a combat knife, surveillance goggles, several ropes of different length and material, a small hook, cans that looked like bug bombs, but also smoke grenades and a pistol.   
Many a D&D character of Tina’s carried less in their backpack than Gavin planned to take in real life tonight, never mind that Markus had done that in a t-shirt, on broken legs and with one eye missing.

Daniel noticed that the human had tremendous fun choosing his equipment. It was everything Gavin Reed had dreamed to bring with him when he had been a kid exploring Detroit. Back then large parts of the city had been de-populated because of the economic decline Detroit had experienced after the automotive industry had suffered greatly from foreign competitors. The resulting no man’s land had become home to many urban tribes like the one the Reeds had been part of. There had been no shortage of abandoned homes, but often enough the homeless had had to squat in tents because the more violent gangs had claimed the best property already. But there had also always been another factory hall to get braved with baseball bats, great-grandfather’s steel helmet and scraps of poisoned meat.   
Daniel suspected the place they were headed for was the ultimate playground in his partner’s eyes. Himself he broke away from the wall after some consideration to get something from downstairs. He returned carrying a bag and a holster.

“You’re taking a pistol, too?” Gavin nodded his approval. “Good think… wait, what’s that?!”

“This, my love”, Daniel introduced his own weapon, “is your new Heckler & Koch MP7A7!” The pride and affection the android put into this sentence he was usually reserving for Emma Phillips. 

“That’s a submachine gun…”

“A PDW, correctly. Don’t worry, you passed the background check with ease and also have a license for concealed carry.”

“When you say “your”…”

“…yep, mine actually. Don’t get ideas!”

A corner of Gavin’s mouth twitched, then went up. “Concealed carry indeed!” he laughed. “I carry the gun concealed on my android! No amount of patting me down would ever reveal it.”

“Yeah, you are so clever”, Daniel replied, laughing, too.

“But we **are** clever! No joke!” Gavin claimed. He looked up at Daniel with an unusually serious expression. “Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”

Clever. That and competent. Heck, Daniel had been an almost as good detective as Gavin himself, the man had to admit. The thought alone that some sucker would have called the PL600 “outdated”… or that Daniel had believed it for many months…   
Why, even? After the automated car had targeted freshman Gavin, thus driving home the lesson how little exactly he was worth in the eyes of society, the young man had lashed out even harder into every direction than before, starting with the other student, the valuable one who had gotten spared by the computer.   
What did Gavin James Reed care about anybody’s opinion? He knew what he wanted and would get it. Except… except of course that contrary to Gavin, Daniel did care. The deviant made room for others in his thirium pump and he managed to do so without becoming an ickle prefect Percy like Connor or a depressed do-gooder like Hank. Daniel was so… normal. That wasn’t a quality you praised in a boyfriend, usually. And there were hundreds of thousands of other average peeps that Gavin didn’t feel drawn towards. There was probably something super-special to his partner that the man failed to notice. But knowing what exactly that was would not have changed anything between them, so why torture your head with trying to figure it out?

“What’s in the bag?” Gavin asked to change the topic.

There was a slight delay in Daniel’s reply when he said “Personal effects” and another pause before the deviant clarified: “Like, uh, accessories.”

“Accessories for the H & K!”

Daniel waved his hands about. “Don’t worry about that”, he told his partner. “I’m far more dangerous than the weapon, yet you take me to bed with you.”

Gavin looked at his dungeoneer’s kit, then shrugged. If he could bring his toys, Daniel should by all means bring his. 

Again Daniel’s gaze drifted over his partner’s equipment. It reminded him of Emma wanting to take half her room’s contents to the park when she had been smaller. And three guesses who would have had to carry all of that, if this someone didn’t manage to talk the child out of her ideas real quick! Were all humans such packrats?! Was is something that came with constantly having to eat and take potty breaks? It sounded stressful to Daniel. But fortunately in his case it didn’t matter, because unlike a foster-daughter a boyfriend would have to carry his own shit by himself. 

“Got everything or is still something missing?” Daniel teased. “Provisions for a week? A four-person-tent, maybe? Thyroid hormone pills?

With a grin Gavin displayed his combat knife. “Food anytime!” Next the thin sheets that were rescue blankets got produced. “Shelter!” And finally a strip of four pills. “Probably not needed”, Gavin commented on them. “I only ever miss taking them when Markus abducts us.”

“You make that sound as if it happened to us on a regular basis!”

“Well, he got me twice and you thrice. And there’s no telling what he’s brewing up in Strasbourg right as we speak.”

“No need to ponder Markus, when we are looking forward to putting ourselves in danger all on our own later tonight”, Daniel replied. Despite him still not liking the idea, the deviant was smiling. “At the very least this expedition will be exerting”, he said. “Therefore I want you to be in top-condition!”

“Oh?” There was that grin again, this time knowing. “Got something in mind…?”

“Uh-huh”, Daniel confirmed. “Something energizing.”

“Heh.”

Gavin rose from the floor. At the same time his boyfriend kicked open the bedroom door, leaving no room for mistaking what was offered – or demanded.

Those who knew him linked it to the deviant’s temper problem, but whatever the reason, Daniel was one of the few sexually active deviants. At first the partners’ activities had been limited, but in Strasbourg Daniel had requested a full upgrade.   
Daniel would never be able to link with his human boyfriend, but at least he could feel him inside himself now. The deviant channeled a lot of his creativity into coming up with new experiences for both of them. Who would willingly trade that in for something that happened in the mind only? A lot of androids, admittedly, many of which Daniel knew in person. But their way of bonding wasn’t his and his meerkat’s. As for Gavin, he had never experienced mind-to-mind joining, so he wasn’t missing anything. 

As they moved towards each other, Daniel connected to their apartment’s multimedia installation briefly. There was a particular song he liked to play on this occasion. Admittedly at first it had caught his attention because the accompanying video showed rabbits and of course those didn’t leave much to the imagination. 

_When we fight, we fight like lions… but then we love and feel the truth  
They say we’re out of control, and some say we’re sinners  
You are perfection, my only direction  
It’s fire on fire_

The poor rabbits in the video didn’t even do anything along the lines of Daniel’s associations, they were just having an adventure. And so was he, now…


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel and Gavin sneak into the landfill, where they encounter a dying android. Gavin still isn’t in favor of androids other than his partner, especially not after he has a worrying realization about this place.

A city the size of Detroit never really went dark. Even in the abandoned sectors campfires would lit the night in places not even the CyberLife tower’s corona reached. VETA solid waste landfill , however, was situated a little out of town and only lit in places where it was absolutely necessary. The place gave a citydweller an inkling of what the real night was like.

A car slipped routinely into the parking lot, effortless, inconspicuous. After it had come to a halt, the human behind the steering wheel loosened the safety belt, then caressed his passenger’s cheek.

“Wake up, slide-rule”, he said softly.

With a barely audible “whirr” the android on the passenger seat snapped out of energy saving mode. It took it some seconds to re-orientate itself.

“Huh? Where… oh.”

“We’re there”, the human behind the steering wheel announced. “The solid waste landfill.”

“Damn! You just had to say it out loud!”

Of course Gavin would have. That mean streak of his didn’t go away just because he had a boyfriend now. And admittedly Daniel was still calling him a pathetic mortal on occasion. 

The deviant didn’t bother with touching anything in the car. He mentally overrode the electronic controls, the belt retracted, the door opened and the seat turned clockwise to make exiting the car easier. Once outside however, Daniel grabbed the door and slammed it shut full force with his own hands.

“What’s your gripe?” Gavin prodded while exiting at the car’s opposite side. He circled it until he stood next to his partner. “The Phillips would not have driven you here!”

“Nah”, Daniel agreed. “They’d probably have told me to walk over here, report to the janitor and mail them a receipt of disposal before shutting down myself.”

“The suckers”, Gavin commented, but in a noncommittal way only. The man meant what he was saying, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Here they stood, in form-fitting black clothes and padded vests. Daniel was also wearing his weighted gloves with the retractable claws and carrying an automatic pistol while Gavin had brought a full burglar’s kit. Because one way or another, they needed a PL600 corpse to put into the DPD’s archive in Daniel’s place. Now Gavin would have very much preferred to skewer a legally purchased pre-owned PL600 from the CyberLife store instead of going through the landfill to find a safely dead one. Only that this would have had led to major relationship stress of the kind the man could not afford again for another three months or so.

Human and android sighed in unison. Their gazes drifted along the security fence.

“Fuck, man…” Daniel muttered.

Gavin reached up and clapped his partner on the shoulder.

“Anytime, Danny, anytime”, he said. “But for now – see that fence segment to our left? That doesn’t look as if it could withstand a determined kick.”

“How convenient that’s exactly what I’m feeling like right now!”

Entering the disposal area the men at first were able to follow a well trodden path. To their left and right heaps of garbage were scattered in the landscape like low hills. Each one was separate and with plenty of space between itself and the next one. Of course that would change later, once they got deeper in.

Daniel kicked a plastic bottle that was lying on the ground. As it flew towards the nearest trash heap it spun around. For a moment the “Product of Cyberlife” logo was visible on the transparent plastic.  
The sight made Gavin stop for a moment. “Saaaaaay, with all the spare parts and thirium that must have piled up here”, he mused aloud, “the place should be crawling with salvagers. I mean, it’s like money lying around.” The thought seemed to both excite and worry the man. “We should proceed with caution!”

“I guess so”, Daniel agreed. “Also they’ll have guards. I wonder… dodge!”

The next thing Gavin knew was getting shoved towards a trash heap and forced down. Next to him Daniel went into kneeling position. The android’s H&K MP7A7 appeared in his hand almost magically. And thus they were cowering right next to where they belonged: the trash (as the DPD officers would have claimed, anyway).   
Daniel’s hand was steady, eyes focused on something in the distance. They were flickering to here and there as if following something that constantly changed its position. And then the human noticed it, too: There was movement between the heaps. A shadow here, the rustle of garbage put into motion by something passing by there… It was probably nothing bigger than an electronic car. Everything else would have produced more noise, too. But even a lone GJ500 on nightwatch could spell trouble for the intruders by means of a single phonecall to its base.

The trespassers kept hunched behind a conglomerate of no longer identifiable objects, not moving, keeping their breath low, watching…

After a while a lone figure emerged from behind a tower made from broken sinks, bathtubs and urinals. It was humanoid, but walking with robotic movements. Every few steps it paused, giving the impression that it needed to remember what came after “right leg”. Eventually the figure stood still. A LED on its temple flickered – red, out, red out, red…   
It was an android and now the trespassers also noticed the remains of the uniform that went with that status. They could not read the model designation from their hiding place, but the cap and overall suggested an outdoors worker of some kind.

Daniel sheathed his pistol. He wanted to rise, but Gavin tugged at the android’s vest.

“Don’t! That thing isn’t looking too healthy. What if it wants to explode?”

“Nobody “wants” to explode!” Daniel snapped.

As he broke free and hustled towards the damaged android, the LED went out without coming online again. Since no more act of willpower kept it upright, the android slowly keeled over. It crashed on the ground the moment Daniel reached it.

The deviant knelt down. He got out his phone battery pack and connected it to the port in the back of the fallen android’s neck where it did… nothing. The energy was sucked up by the other system, but with no more controlling instance that told it how to use that energy the mechanism remained dormant.  
“I do not know what else to try”, Daniel whispered to nobody in particular. He was alone and had already tried everything in his abysmally thin booklet of android first aid knowledge. For all practical purposes the other android was dead.

“There must be something I can do!” Daniel wailed.

If only he could think harder! Put the computing power inside his own head to some use! But right now he felt as dead in there as the fallen park worker android.

“Something!” Daniel pressed the words out. “There just has to be! Something...”

“There isn’t.”

Daniel felt Gavin’s arms around him, the human’s hands grabbing his own, holding them fast.

“I know this must suck”, Gavin said, pressing the other’s hands tighter. “Mourn if you feel like it, but don’t blame yourself!”

Daniel had to believe his partner. Gavin Reed had been a cop and before that a private eye for longer than the android existed. He must have seen his share of similar crap, Daniel thought. Victims found dead in the streets or in their own homes, people dying right before his eyes, sometimes because they fell to the bullets of his co-workers. Tina’s, probably? Or Gavin’s own? His friend had never talked about accidently or deliberately having taken a life, but Daniel didn’t want to rule out the possibility.  
Good thing Gavin and Tina combined had the empathy of a mechanical herb grinder! Because otherwise they couldn’t have done that job. And right now it also seemed to be a good thing that he himself had quit, although there were days Daniel was missing policework.

“We cannot let… it lie around like that”, Daniel eventually decided.

He looked around, located a turned over armchair and dragged Gavin behind him towards it. The human put it up again, then they moved the shut down android into the seat. That way, Daniel argued, it would have an easier time getting up should it come to its senses again. 

Gavin said nothing at first, going along with whatever his partner seemed to need for his mental balance. Only when Daniel asked him to check whether there was still a little thirium in the bottle they had found earlier and get it for him, did the man protest: “What’s next? Leaving our phone number?”

There was no need for that, Daniel knew. The Underground Airline’s contact code should be hidden nearby in some advertisement of VETA’s, the company that managed the landfill. Connor had planted it there, right after the organization had formed.  
But that particular bit of information wasn’t something Daniel would have entrusted Gavin with. Although the detective had laughed away the network’s existence upon discovering it, there was no telling how he would react to learning more details about the scope of the whole operation. At the moment the detective was all “out of sight, out of mind”, off to Europe with the deviants and be done with the problem at home! But if Gavin Reed realized that every android rescued by the Underground Airline was another soldier to join Markus’s potentially world conquering army all bets might be off. It was safer to not remind him of the network’s existence too often.

“Why was it still active, anyway?” Gavin asked. He sat on the chair’s armrest, arms crossed and scanning the surroundings with his surveillance goggles. “I mean, normally you turn off a device before you throw it away. Do you think someone re-activated the android on purpose?”

Daniel shook his head. “That’s the normal state of this place”, he replied. “Markus told me as much. Maybe lightning gets the androids up and running again or maybe some of them shut down and get sent here, but they weren’t really dead and regain consciousness. Or some kid wants to be cruel… There are many causes.”

Gavin jumped off the armchair. “You mean our municipal landfill is crawling with half-dead androids?!” he shouted.

“Looks like it.”

“Creepy...! And are they fucking everywhere? Or is there an android cemetery somewhere in this dump?”

Daniel shrugged. “I think they have _some_ kind of sorting system here” he ventured, pointing towards the plumbing tower. “There might be all-android sections. During the recall of ’38 alone there must have been thousands of victims.”

“You think they are still around today?”

“Yes.” Daniel gesticulated around vaguely. “Look around you, Gavin! Most of the stuff here doesn’t look as if VETA goes around to harvest still salvageable stuff often. Or even puts much effort into curating what they’ve got. Human wastefulness is our salvation.”

Gavin opened his mouth only to shut it again. He attempted another start, but this time stood gape-jawed for several seconds. Thousands of android bodies? Thousands of very angry androids with easy access to improvised weapons both of the sharp and the bludgeoning variety? This was Daniel’s idea of a sane way to get a PL600 corpse? At this rate he could just have phoned one and asked it to shamble into town nicely come morning!  
And who guaranteed them that the androids were not planning exactly that? They had a base, they had the materials and they certainly had the brains. Any morning now a fucking army of android zombies could pour into Detroit! This was worse, much worse, then any of the job stealing shit the man had dreaded all those years.  
Frantically Gavin looked around for a handy hydraulic press or a shovel dredger. When a quick scan of their immediate vicinity didn’t yield any such mechanism of mass destruction, the man shrugged.

“Let’s look around for a PL600 other than you”, he resigned. “That’s what we’ve come here for, after all.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel and Gavin stumble around the landfill without much success. They get a first taste of all the little dangers of the landscape that add up.

They made their way through the hills made up from their city’s waste. Most of the trash wasn’t even recognizable anymore. There were bended bars, wires and weirdly out of shape plastic structures. Even if some of those had been androids once, their remains were of no use to the hopeful thieves.   
In several places the VETA workers had tried to create collections of just metal, fabric or plastic, but more often than not some later arriving employee had added random waste to the mix and called it a day.

Daniel and Gavin were not the only living beings who were assessing the goodies that night. A rat was scouring the garbage for a meal. It found a nest of birds, all of them dead, but ignored it and scurried away. On closer inspection the budgies turned out to be mechanic birds.   
The hungry rodent had, however, dug free something interesting. There was a shimmer of bright blue within the black mass. Gavin stopped, bend down and retrieved a stained android armband from the trash. The rags nearby might be the remains of the uniform shirt that went with it. Of its owner there was no sign anywhere. Maybe someone had just replaced their android’s uniform.

“Keep the armband for now”, Daniel whispered. “We might have to put together my replacement piece by piece.”

What Gavin replied to that the deviant could not hear. Chances were he would not have wanted to anyway.

Deeper and deeper the trespassers went into the site. There was no more path to follow for them now. The trash heaps were interconnecting and in some places it was safer to jump from top to top instead of risking walking in the narrow ravine between two heaps that’s’ walls might collapse any moment and bury any biped, human or android alike.  
Daniel and Gavin reached a sort of plateau. Although they could still make out the summits of the individual trash heaps that had contributed to its formation, these tops were sticking out no higher than mole hills.

And here they finally got lucky to find an android. A whole one, and definitely dead. Gavin tested it by giving the thing a heartfelt kick. The only problem was that the android in question was naked and had its outer skin deactivated. There was no telling what model it had been in life. At least it didn’t have breasts that would have made it ineligible to act as Daniel’s decoy.

“Can we switch it on for a sec and get the skin flowing to see what we’ve got here?” Gavin asked.

“I wouldn’t know how to do that.”

“Hm. But there must be something on the body to go by. Like, a brand, maybe?”

Daniel nodded. “There ought to be”, he confirmed. 

Together they knelt down next to the android. Daniel extended the claws from his gloves to use them to scrape away the dirt from the plastic surface. The deviant wasn’t the first to test the body: Tiny teethmarks revealed that the local rat population had tried and found it inedible.

“I see the CyberLife logo and some lettering”, Daniel said. “But with all the scratches on the body I cannot read it. Might as well be a prayer in cuneiform. Let’s let him rest.”

“Yeah, sure”, Gavin murmured to himself. It wasn’t hard to guess what irked the man: Nothing that was not helpful to him and Daniel deserved rest, let alone respect in Gavin’s book. 

It didn’t get any better from there on. First Daniel stepped into a doorless microwave oven that had lain in the trash with the opening facing upwards. When he retracted his foot, the stove came upwards with it, what in turn loosened a whole strata below, causing the two to hop to safety while the ground started moving under their feet.   
Eventually the partners managed to find a reasonably stable spot where they sat down and got rid of Daniel’s ankle ornament.

“We all know that by right you need an electronic cuff, but we were thinking more along the lines of those that send your position, not whether your foot is roasted nicely yet”, Gavin teased.  
They laughed, then Daniel pulled something out of the ground, more carefully this time. It was a severed android arm. The deviant held it in front of his eyes, trying to analyze his feelings towards it. He realized that there were none. Although Daniel knew exactly what he was holding there, it didn’t feel any more creepy than part of a doll or a mannequin.   
Daniel knew that what he experienced was a coping mechanism inherent in the human psyche that he somehow had acquired by having lived as one of them for almost two years. 

My deviant brain be blessed! he thought.

Daniel showed the arm to his companion.

“Speaking of feet… here’s the opposite. Does this look like a leftie to you? We might need one.”

“Yep. Nice find!”

They were just about to help each other up when suddenly a bright light engulfed them both. Gavin’s goggles adjusted themselves to the change, but Daniel hissed as if in pain. Gavin grabbed him out of an reflex. It turned out to be exactly the right reaction, because the android was flailing around aimlessly with three arms, his own two and the one they had just picked up.

“What’s the matter again NOW?”

“Got blinded”, Daniel replied.

“Blinded my ass!” Gavin yelled. But then he noticed Daniel blinking. Tears were running from out of his artificial eyes. Gavin could only hope that they were of the illusionary variety that was part of the skin’s function and not the real ones aka blur blood oozing out of the body. “How come?” the human asked.

“Blame CyberLife and their “as lifelike as possible” policy”, Daniel cursed. “Fuck Jason Graff!”

Still caught in the bright beam the partners straightened up. The light wasn’t static, they noticed now. It was, in fact, moving from the left to the right in a steady rhythm that the policemen knew far too well. Someone was actively searching the area with a big headlight. 

“I hear something approaching”, Daniel said. “What is it?”

Gavin looked back over his shoulder, still holding Daniel who in turn was not letting go of the android arm. And then he looked stricken.

“You don’t want to see it”, the man said. “Like, really not.” 

He gulped. 

"And come to think of it, neither do I!!!”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daniel has an insight on human/android co-existence. But first he and Gavin need to survive the encounter with a resident of the landfill.

Another android appeared out of the darkness. Without the surveillance goggles Gavin would have had a hard time making it out against the background, because its chassis had been painted in dark blue and dark grey tones that concealed a form against the night much better than pure black.   
The android seemed to stand right behind the searchlight. No, Gavin had to correct that. The machine wasn’t holding a lamp, but projecting the light right out of its eyes. Therefore any details about its body remained concealed. There was no telling what model it was – or had been, rather. A TR400 probably, from the sheer size of it. A heavily modified TR400, though, that had parts of other androids attached to itself. Under what circumstances and to what purpose that had happened, Gavin and Daniel could only guess. But one thing they knew: A guy with a sawblade for a hand was hardly ever good news.

The android spoke up. In an upbeat, almost chirpy voice it announced: “Good evening Sir! We are closed, but even so I will gladly take the android off you.”

That was all the incentive Daniel needed. Lightning fast as always he directed his H&K at the source of the sound and pulled the trigger through. Take him? To add to the trash? That was bad enough, but saying it in Connor’s voice to add insult to injury was crossing a line!

The bullets hit… something. Daniel still could not see anything (except if you counted all those orange and green rings merging into and out of each other) and Gavin wasn’t sure what exactly it was he was seeing, because it was happening too fast. There was movement, the trash android seemed to have brought forth a buckler of some kind that absorbed most of the impact. Then, instead of discarding its shield the layman’s way by investing the extra effort of tossing it away, the machine simply dropped the useless item and returned the fire from out of its own fingers.

Frantically the trespassers dived for cover, any cover they could find. In his panic Daniel finally dropped the severed arm. That turned out their salvation, because the patchwork android went to pick the limb up and inspect it.  
While it was occupied thus, Gavin and Daniel didn’t dare moving behind their makeshift barricade. It was white and soft, with springs sticking out of it. An upturned mattress maybe? No, the texture was all wrong and besides, no mattress could smell like a wet dog. Come to think of it, no mattress would look at you with a dead eye the size of a large dog’s. A real large dog’s.

“Have you noticed?” Daniel asked in Morse-code via his LED.

Gavin nodded, but Daniel failed to see it, still alternating his attention between the dumpster android and the furry barricade.

“I-T-S-stopp-A-stopp-P-O…”

“Don’t say it!” Gavin pleaded. He tried to form the words with his lips alone to avoid any sound.

“L-A-R-stopp-B…”

“Yes, I know! It’s a fucking decomposing polar bear!” Gavin exclaimed. “But maybe I’m just dreaming this shit while in truth I’m lying in my bbbbbbbbbbbb….”

Daniel put the hand he was not holding the gun with over his partner’s mouth.

“Shush!”

Meanwhile the patchwork android had finished his assessment of the severed arm. It dismissed it as useless and carelessly tossed it over its shoulder.

Daniel and Gavin winced when they heard Connor’s voice coming from that thing again: “Sir…? The one with the android! Are you still here?”  
When it received no answer, the android shrugged in a very human and very un-connorlike way.  
It looked around some more, then walked into the general direction Gavin and Daniel had come from. After a few steps it picked up a small item the trespassers could not see. The android put its finding into its mouth, went through some calculations, then retrieved the piece and finally placed it in a belt pouch, only that the “pouch” seemed to be very much a part of the android body.

“Bed”, Gavin uttered when then android had finally gotten out of sight and Daniel took his hand off the man’s mouth. “I so want to be in my bed right now…”

“I bet you do!” Daniel agreed.

Did Gavin imagine it or was his partner looking even paler than normally?

“Good thing its aim wasn’t calibrated properly”, Daniel said in a low voice.

“Yeah”, Gavin agreed. He started to absentmindedly stroke the polar bear fur.

“If it isn’t maintained well”, Daniel mused aloud, “it probably wasn’t the official night watchman.”

“Uh-uh, nothing official”, Gavin agreed. “More like a ghoul. It feeds on the dead, to keep running and to improve itself towards surviving in this environment. That‘s urban evolution at work.”

“So it’s just trying to survive? But so do we! It shouldn’t be like this… We should… Someone… ”

Daniel’s voice trailed off.

“And it ate a Connor! Maybe even one of our Connor’s used bodies!” Gavin remembered. “That shouldn’t be allowed, them things dining on people you know!”

Now a smile flashed across Daniel’s stricken face. “People?”

Still stroking the fur Gavin murmured “What gives”, what could mean anything or nothing. After some more time he concluded: “No reason for Connor to let it get to his head. Being a person is like, the lowest common denominator. Even Hitler managed it.”

Gavin let go of the polar bear.

“Get your arm back! Your other arm. The one we found, I mean.”

“Will do. But first…”

Daniel opened his pistol. Angrily he shoved armor piercing ammunition into it, then slammed it shut and sheathed it again.

“Who’d have known we’d have to take down a fucking tank”, the android grumbled while doing so.

Daniel got up and, after quickly scanning the area, went looking for the discarded android arm. They were not even certain if it would be of any use to them, but so far it was their only discovery here and it had distracted the ghoul, therefore they considered it as something of a good luck charm.

“Wait, Danny!”

Gavin removed his goggles and reached up to pull them over the android’s face. 

“These come with flash compensation, among other things. From now on you stand watch, while I go through the trash. It’s safer that way.”

“Can you see anything at all?”

“Yes. I have pretty good night vision as is. Also the good old flashlight.”

“Okay.” 

“But one thing is for certain: This encounter wasn’t going a long way towards making me like androids more!”

 _I dunno, my friend,_ Daniel thought to himself. _Until tonight I never heard you admit that Connor of all people is a person._

The way Daniel understood the process, this was exactly how it worked in the real world. You didn’t win over the haters with reasoning and neither by being kind to them. Where humans – and deviant androids – were concerned, the most powerful forces driving them were habit and a will to not stick out too much. Laws normalizing something could go some way, but direct and continued exposure was working like a charm.   
First there had been Brandon Colch, a criminal so low in Gavin’s perception that him being an android could not worsen the man’s opinion of him. That had been the first breach.   
Then Gavin and Hank, dead drunk both of them, had liberated Daniel from the archive after an irregular party. At first the android had run around the DPD like an automated vacuum cleaner. Later he had spoken up on occasion and even gotten into arguments with the detective, but also bonded with him over their shared disdain for the returned Connor. Somehow that had created a blind spot in Gavin’s perception. Daniel no longer registered on the man’s “Android!” radar.   
And from there, not unlike program instability in an android, the first impact had created ripples. Luther… Alice… Markus… during their investigation/captivity on the Adeline, Gavin had learned to tolerate almost every android in Markus’s retinue. In the end even North had been “terrorist chick” to him instead of the former demeaning “fuckbot”.   
Gavin could still not tell Rika from Chika, but no one at the DPD was able to tell the two ST300 receptionists apart. And not long ago the man had gone out of his way to clear up the trouble a nameless PC200 android at the DPD had gotten into. 

Out loud Daniel said, in a teasing tone: “Or towards being less afraid of them?”

“Nah”, Gavin waved his hand about. “Not of that one! A dumb brute like that is not likely to put me out of employment. It could replace David Allen, though.”

“Don’t start me on him!”

“Won’t. – Oh, my god, will you look at that!”

They were standing on the uneven plateau, looking deeper into the landfill’s geography. In the distance searchlights were illuminating a landscape not unlike the moon’s surface. There were hills and craters and what looked like mining shafts left open by prospectors. The sight was so alien that Gavin would have believed Daniel had he claimed the shafts had gotten installed to allow the dead androids’ souls to escape into the afterlife.   
In some places there was definite activity, either human or automated: cranes were moving their arms around, heavy tracked vehicles were either flattening the ground or moving the inventory around. Scattered here and there were tiny barracks, probably storage areas used by the VETA employees.  
Both partners winced when they heard an explosion in the distance. They could only hope that it had been a controlled detonation and not some ominous gases coming up through vents in the garbage.

“What the fuck”, Daniel whispered the line that should have been Gavin’s. There really wasn’t anything else that could have been said there and then.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finally Gavin and Daniel have found a PL600 in the trash, but getting it out whole is another matter altogether. Daniel resorts to a solution that makes him question how far he has really come.

A while later Daniel was standing at the top of an open shaft, keeping watch. Meanwhile Gavin was down on his belly and wiggling his flashlight around.

“You were right”, the detective said. “It is a PL600 indeed that’s lying there on the bottom. Damn! This could have been our lucky break on this godforsaken “quest”.”

“Why only "could"?” Daniel asked back, not averting his attention from their surroundings. “Something wrong with the shaft? It looked stable enough earlier.”

“Uh…”

“Uh” was, in fact, a pretty good summarization of the shaft’s state. For one, it was made out of android bodies piled upon one another. Most had reverted to their factory settings state, but on some of them the outer skins were still online.   
Nearly all of the ones with their skins intact were also still wearing android uniforms, but in one case also - and upon noticing that Gavin had vomited into the shaft - a baseball cap with the stallion of the Detroit Pistons. Seeing all the standard android attire was one thing, but another altogether to spot individuals you could relate to within the mass grave. The Pistons cap was even worse than the various hands and feet sticking out of the walls and into the shaft. Or the fact that some of those were still moving…

“I, uh, erred. It’s kinda unstable, after all.”

“Oh. Too bad.”

Nearby, although still in a safe distance from the would-be graverobbers, a crane yanked around. The claw opened to release more dead bodies into the landfill. Daniel registered it with clenched teeth.

“Yes, too bad. Too bad for **us** , meerkat!” he exclaimed. “Sorry, but, not sorry. We’ve wasted enough time and I’ll probably have nightmares of that dead polar bear chasing me for weeks to come. Calling out for me in Connor’s voice for bonus points. We’ve got to get that PL600, so that we can finally be done with this expedition!”

“Heh! Now you are talking, slide-rule!”

Gavin moved away from the shaft’s opening to where his backpack stood. It was time to put some of its contents to good use! The man took out the bigger of the two grappling hooks. It was of the folding variety. Daniel thought that the device would not do them much good. They didn’t want to dredge the android carcass up a gentle slope, but lift it upwards.   
On closer inspection the presumed grapnel turned out to be a grabber. The claw’s opening was facing away from the handle, not towards it. In its ready state the device consisted of four arms that were held apart by a wedge. On contact the wedge would drop and the claw snap shut. It was the same principle grabber machines at fun fairs employed, the difference being that this one wasn’t rigged against the user.

“And now you and me are doing some wholesome family fun – we’re going fishing!” Gavin said, waving invitingly. “Give me a hand here, will you? And the metal pole!”

Wordlessly Daniel handed over the pole they had found earlier. Gavin had used it to test the ground before them so far. Now he slammed two narrow metal bands that the dump had provided down the pole’s length to roughly the middle. They formed a groove just wide enough for the grabber’s rope to run through. Daniel recognized the improvised construction as a very basic pulley system. Only then did it dawn to him that one was needed. They didn’t want the android corpse to scrape along the shaft’s wall, after all.

Together they put the pole across the shaft’s opening. They secured it on both ends with more garbage and the help of, much to Daniel’s astonishment, a small welder. But having seen his boyfriend pack all the stuff, honestly he should not have been surprised to find a build-your-own-android kit at the backpack’s bottom. Or in a side pouch. 

“Okay, this shit’s sure to stay in place”, Gavin said after having tested the construction.

They ran the rope over the pole and lowered it slowly into the shaft. As Daniel watched it descent, he couldn’t help but notice the heads, torsos and limbs.

“Oh”, he uttered.

“Right.”

Nothing else was said.

The hopeful fishers let the grabber dangle over the PL600’s body. The dead android wasn’t helpful enough to lie directly below the device, therefore Daniel had to maneuver the rope into place with a poker. The whole operation seemed unnecessarily complicated to him, but then again, so was cooking to Gavin. Daniel had to trust his human that he knew what he was doing.

Finally the claw snatched the body. Gavin re-aligned the rope until it sat firmly inside the groove and then they could start pulling. As the torso got lifted off the ground it bent somewhat, with head, arms and legs dangling. The good news was that none of the limbs detached during the process. The corpse seemed to still hold together after however long it had lain on the shaft’s bottom.   
Hopefully not too well, Gavin thought. The last thing they needed was the android snapping back to consciousness and say “Hi” to them.

The bad news was that the attachments made the whole package unstable. Despite all the care the graverobbers had taken, their corpse was moving towards the shaft’s wall, after all. It bounced off, only to drift into the opposite direction – where it was caught by a set of moving fingers! They grabbed and caught a hold, unwilling to let go again.

“What the…!” Gavin uttered. He looked down more closely and yelled: “Gah! A zombie android’s fucking stealing our corpse!”

“Well, just pull harder!” Daniel suggested.

“Can’t! We might lose our catch!”

They stopped pulling and gazed down into the shaft. Whatever had grabbed the PL600 had to be under the impression of having caught onto something it could use to pull itself out of the mass grave. It was tugging harder at the corpse now...

“This is no good”, Gavin whispered.

“I know.”

Daniel looked down. Not because he felt like shit now, or better: Not _just_ because he felt like shit.   
The android was also trying to gauge how deep they would have to dig to reach the moving fingers’ owner. The tools needed… the risk of the whole shaft collapsing, destroying all the other still wriggling half-dead androids in the process… the statistical probability of there being deviants in the mess…   
But the numbers were not adding up favorably in any sub-calculation. Probably if they had more time on their hands. An army of helpers. An official writ of some kind. But as things stood, there was nothing they could do.

Slowly Daniel drew his submachine gun.

“I’m sorry, stranger”, he whispered. “But it’s you or me now…”

Tears in his eyes Daniel tried to pull the trigger, but his grip was as shaky as the dying android’s down in the shaft. Standing next to his partner Gavin remembered something from earlier today. Something Daniel had said when they had been cuddling on the couch. Something they had laughed about!

“Between the two of us”, the man said in a calm, quiet voice. “You ARE the good guy.”

“Maybe”, Daniel replied. “But not right now.” 

And then he emptied his weapon’s magazine into the shaft. If there was a cry of pain down there, they didn’t hear it. But the hand let go and the dead PL600 started spinning in circles like a panicking spider. The grabber was holding it firmly for Gavin to pull it upwards. The corpse hit the metal pole, Daniel grabbed it and dragged it on firm ground.

Gavin stood towering over both the dead and the living PL600, the rope and the grabber still in hand, as if unsure what to do with them.

“Yes, good idea”, Daniel said between sobs. He held the dead PL600 in his arms, but it wasn’t this already dead android he was crying about.

“What idea? I didn’t have an i… oh, I see.” 

Gavin shrugged, then let the claw snap around the metal pole. He fastened a suitable piece of unrecognizable trash on the rope’s end and let it fall into the shaft. Maybe the climbing aid would do someone or something down there good, maybe not. It didn’t matter to Gavin Reed. All that mattered were Danny and, obviously, himself, and them still being together in the near future.  
The grabber he could replace easily, his Daniel’s happiness to the contrary could not be bought with money. Or rather, Gavin COULD have bought it, in a CyberLife store, to be specific. If only he had kept his trap shut! If only he hadn’t announced his plans to buy a pre-owned PL600 to replace Daniel in the evidence archive and if only that hadn’t offended Daniel, ultimately resulting in this crazy foray into the landfill!

Gavin touched Daniel’s shoulder.

“Come on”, he whispered. “Those floodlights are way too close to our position for my liking.”

The android nodded. Only one of the androids, as Gavin registered much to his relief.

Extending a hand Gavin repeated his “Come on!”. He dragged Daniel up and then, not letting go of the other’s hand, nuzzled his boyfriend.

“But you hate that”, Daniel said, still shedding tears.

“I hate a lot of things, but here we are, standing in roughly the middle of the one that’s currently topping my list”, Gavin replied, smiling at the partner. “Let’s get away from here!”

They started walking away from the shaft, trying to concentrate on the sounds their own feet caused instead of any noise possibly emerging from down in the dump or the machines at work around them.

Daniel was carrying the PL600 corpse. Gavin slung his arm around both.

“Also I just remembered it’s election year”, he grunted. “We might want to have a serious talk about source-segregated recycling with our district representative!”  



	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The dead android being Daniel’s spitting image Gavin finds he has a hard time mutilating it sufficiently to work as Daniel’s decoy. Daniel in turn feels let down and takes it out violently on his partner.

They were not done with the landfill yet, after all. 

Safely out of the floodlights’ reach Gavin had put up an improvised shelter from the rescue blankets he had brought. He had remained outside the lean-to himself, having a quiet smoke while allowing Daniel to gather himself. For some time it had been quiet in Gavin’s back, but now he heard noises. The man grinned, because the sounds were strongly suggesting that Daniel’s gathering himself had entered the kicking up the garbage and cursing humankind stage.   
Gavin finished his cigarette and turned around. And predictably Daniel was just sending a very surprised and very annoyed rat flying across the dump.

“That wasn’t a human, though”, Gavin remarked.

“But close enough.”

“And how’s YOUR relative doing?” Gavin asked, referring to the android corpse that was lying to both their feet. The PL600 hadn’t moved or so much as blinked since they had excavated it from deeper inside the landfill.

“That depends on whether he has lived a good life or was more like us”, Daniel answered. “He’s dead, Gavin. Soul fled, won’t return, sings with the angels and so on.”

Gavin let out a relieved sigh. So their efforts hadn’t been in vain, at least.

“Only complication, I accidently hit the corpse, too, when I fired into the shaft. It’s leaking thirium now.”

Curiously Gavin drew closer. They hunkered down next to the corpse where Daniel took advantage of the other PL600’s leakage by smearing the blue blood all over its shirt, arms and face.

“You wouldn’t have phone pictures of me?” Daniel asked while working on making the dead resemble himself after getting shot. “You know – from when I was in the archive? Nah, forget it. Stupid question.”

“You might want to ask Connor to share memories with you”, Gavin suggested. “And I don’t know why I said that now!”

“Good idea, though. Ask him to upload the images for you to open in a photo viewer! Then you and Tina can give the corpse the required finishing touches. Myself, I won’t get anywhere near the DPD before this isn’t out of the world.”

Gavin said nothing. How come his partner could be so damn unfazed while everything inside the human was like ice? Probably because there were so many PL600s in the USA. Unlike the RKs there were far too many of them for any two individuals to consider themselves close relatives. Gavin remembered that on the Adeline Daniel and Simon had not shown any interest in perceiving each other as siblings. Of course Daniel had accused the latter of drug smuggling, what had put quite a damper on their relationship…  
Anyway, another PL600 was no closer to Daniel than any Caucasian male would have been to Gavin.

The other way around, however… Gavin did not see a random out of commission PL600 lying on its back. Maybe if the other one had been walking around, speaking in a different mode of speech than Danny, wearing something other than the iconic uniform… but the way he was stretched out there, Gavin saw his boyfriend. Dead.

“Okay, that’s it. I think I did a pretty good job”, Daniel chatted away. “We’ll keep the legs attached for ease of transport, you can hack them off once you’re in the archive. Now help me smash the head in! Right here, please!”

“Help you do… what? And what was that about chopping off your legs? Daniel! I cannot do that!”

“Hello? Is that still Gavin Reed in there?” Daniel asked, pointing at his boyfriend’s head. “Why would you of all people be shy about cutting up an android?”

“Dammit, Danny! How come you cannot tell? It looks like you!”

“It isn…”

“Yes, I know, I know! It isn’t you. I still can’t do it!”

Daniel stared at his partner for several seconds. Eventually he asked, calmly, yet with an undertone Gavin could not quite place: “Do you love me or not?”

“I do! That’s why I cannot mutilate your twin.”

“So, you can’t.”

Still so deceptively calm… but the next moment Daniel grabbed Gavin and pushed him to the ground next to the dead PL600. 

“I asked you if you love me while I’m sitting here ALIVE and need your assistance to STAY so, goddammit!” Daniel shouted. “This is serious and no time to get emotional! Or are you a fucking millennial?”

Gavin wasn’t. He was a “digital native” who felt uneasy in the presence of androids, as contrary as that sounded. And he also really, really, didn’t like getting doubted or, worse, getting pressed into the trash.  
The man brought up his knee, but it didn’t have the intended effect. Daniel switched off the drivers to the parts this particular move targeted whenever he left the house. 

“That was low, Gavin”, Daniel growled while shaking the human.

Gavin kicked again, this time in an attempt to wiggle himself free. The man knew he was stronger than a PL600, but that knowledge did not do him any good when the environment was against him. Already the ground below Gavin was moving. There was a real chance that the trash below might give way and swallow its victim alive. But Daniel held his boyfriend in his grip and on the surface, if only to accuse him:

“Stunningly good looking family android, remember? That’s what you called me!” he shouted. “And now you do not want to damage that pretty face when you see it on someone else? It comes on newer models, too, you know! Maybe you’d love a BL100 better than me anyway! All the looks, none of the trouble…”

“I was “low” just now, but YOU dare ask if I love you?!” Gavin cried back. “Fuck, ey, you KNOW I do! I did so all the time when you were “without makeup”! I never deserted you… or conspired with a deviant army behind your back like SOMEONE I could name!”

“Grrrrrrrr…”

No more words, just that primeval growling. With his opponent allocating too much computing capacity into coming up with a reply that would shift the blame back to Gavin, the human saw his chance! He freed his arm and brought it up between them. Then he grabbed Daniel’s vest, to pull him down towards himself. And there their lips met, while they were laying with their heads half buried in the garbage and with Daniel still wearing the surveillance goggles.

“You are mine!” Gavin gasped after the kiss. “Don’t think even for a moment that anything could change that, because that’s the only choice that’s not fucking yours to make, deviant!”

Gavin took Daniel’s head in his hands. It was a little more fragile than one made of bone and the machine at work inside generated far less body heat. Gavin had noticed that last bit after he had held Daniel in his arms for the first time. Of course he had known about this little detail before that moment, but never really paid attention to it. After experiencing the sensation for the first time it had reinforced the man’s desire to make this co-worker his. 

Fumbling with the headband Gavin at last managed to pull the goggles down. They were dangling around Daniel’s neck now and Gavin was able to look his partner into the eyes. 

“I’m Gavin Reed, the selfish one”, he said. “If I want something, I take it. Sometimes there’s minor setbacks or I don’t understand what it really is that I want. But one thing I do not: make excuses. Not. Ever. If I wanted a BL100 or exclusive rights on Tina I’d take that.” The man paused, allowing what had been said to sink in before he added: “If there was someone else you’d know it.”

“Okay”, Daniel whispered. “I believe you.”

Feeling for each other’s faces… caressing the skin… swatting the occasional bug and centipede away, because this was still the goddamm landfill… kissing. When they parted again, Gavin’s lower legs were buried in plastic cups and bottles and wrapped in a torn kitchen apron. Daniel was sitting on him with half a solar system mobile dangling from his ear. They grinned at each other.

“You wanna make a Uranus joke first or shall I?” Gavin teased.

“No need for more jokes when we’ve just made fools of ourselves”, the android replied. He removed Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter from his head, then asked: “What the hell happened?”

“You got jealous, my dear.”

“What? No way! I didn’t!”

“Jealous!”

“No!”

“Jealous! Jealous! Je-a-lous!” the man said in a sing-song. Now that the episode was over it was hilariously amusing.

“Maybe… a little”, Daniel admitted. “And it’s totally a great relationship milestone!”

Daniel rolled off his partner and onto his back next to him as if they were about to watch the stars together. They needed a breather, but they also needed to get away from this place before it consumed what was left of their sanity.

Gavin moved his head towards Daniel’s shoulder.  
“See?” he said. “No other android I’m cuddling with, least of all our prize body.”

“Really not? It was lying to your left.”

“No, to your right!”

“There is no android here…” 

Gavin groped around for the PL600. There was none.

“There’s none here, either…”

The partners pushed themselves up in unison. Frantically they looked around and then they saw it: The ruckus they had made had sent deeper tiers of trash moving. Small crevices that had existed down below were getting filled, leaving behind free spots for different pieces of waste to pour into. Detroit’s domestic waste was swapping back and forth and on the wave the dead PL600 was drifting.

“Our android carcass gets away!” Gavin cried. “Quick! Grab it!”

Them getting back to their feet only served to accelerate the tectonic movement. Here and there the crust broke open, even. Gavin stepped in one of the gaps, but got grabbed and pulled out by Daniel. The PL600, however, slowly sank down another hole. They dived for it and Daniel got to grab it by one arm. Gavin held it while Daniel used his glove’s claws to dig through the trash until they could pull the body out together without running the danger of damaging it.

“That must have been a deviant”, Gavin commented. “Even in death it tries to escape!”

Beyond caring about right or wrong Daniel laughed and the human joined in. They were once again in a place where they shouldn’t be, once again making inappropriate jokes.

“And to think that I was afraid of entering a museum room only yesterday”, Daniel mused.

“Oh, is it tomorrow already?”

“Yeah, past midnight.”

For some reason that was re-assuring. Neither man believed in the hour of ghosts or in pretty much any transcendental stuff, except when displaying acts of faith granted them freebies at festivals of various religions. Daniel also hoped there was some sort of afterlife, but that covered them both already as far as spirituality went.  
But despite this, the knowledge that from now on they were moving away from the darkness and towards dawn echoed in both men and touched some ancient part of all people. They were feeling their determination return and, in some strange way, also gratitude. But they would not have been able to say what they were feeling grateful for or even naming that sensation as what it was.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just when everything seemed to have ended well, the trash android returns. Gavin needs to think of a way to safe himself, his partner, the mission objective and a lost android child.

Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot… 

Taking turns carrying the PL600 Daniel and Gavin made their way across the landfill. One of them was always holding Daniel’s H&K and keeping watch for more threats like guards or the android ghoul, the other was lugging the equipment and the dead PL600.   
Each step took effort due to the treacherous ground they were traversing. They walked past craters, crossed chasms on narrow bridges, got forced into detours by vehicles coming their way, walked on, stumbled, cursed, laughed dryly at something that was everything but funny… 

The two men had done so for what by now felt like all their lives with little hope of the ordeal ever ending.

“Look, Gavin”, Daniel suddenly spoke up, “when we said you could be more humane, we didn’t mean you breaking into sobs, okay? Just… stop.”

Irritated the human turned around to the living PL600 who was at the moment carrying the dead one. “What are you talking about? It’s you who’s sniffling for some time now and getting louder!”  
Daniel shook his head in consternation.

“Wait – that’s not you?” they exclaimed in unison. “Then who…” 

“…or what”, Gavin added. 

There was only one creature in the world that sounded like a human baby wailing and he had pulled several of them out of dumpsters in his life.  
“Kitty?” the man asked into the void, what prompted the dead PL600 to shake because the living one who was carrying it was erupting into laughter.

“If that’s even remotely a “kitty”, then it’s got to have saber teeth and then even you wouldn’t want to take it home!” Daniel laughed.

Smirking and raising the submachine gun in a playful salute Gavin replied “What’s not to like about a saber-tooth tiger pelt in the bedroom?”, but then he sighed. “For what it’s worth, I admit it was wishful thinking. Because cats are easy and some shit should be easy for a change tonight.”   
The man lowered Daniel’s gun again. “Okay, let’s look around for the sucker in need of rescuing. Looks like we’ll have to make up for breaking into the city’s treasure trove by being not quite bad cops now.”

It didn’t take them long to locate the source of the crying: a stack of empty boxes. Piled onto each other not too carefully they had formed a small cave not unlike those under the roots of a tree. And in there someone lay, fully covered by a colorful patchwork blanket as if it was a shroud. The blanket was bobbing up and down as the occupant was shaking in tears.

Gavin prodded the bundle with the android arm they had found the day before. There was no reaction. The crying continued just like before.

Taking this as a sign that they would at least not have to fear another attack Daniel carefully lifted the blanket. He found himself facing a large teddy bear with bright yellow fur. Both the plushie and the blanket looked as if they had just been removed from a child’s room. They were sticking out from all the garbage around them. They also distracted the mind mercifully from the realization that there was a girlchild curled up under the shroud, looking all miserable and crying blue tears. It was a YK600, the latest in android children. There was no LED on her that would have informed the men about her system status, but on first glance - and not counting the emotional distress - she was looking perfectly fine.

“It’s an android child!” Daniel whispered.

“Well, we fucked yesterday, that usually leads to children”, Gavin joked, but even his voice was a little shaky.

“What are you doing here?” Daniel addressed the girl. It was a stupid question, he knew, but he couldn’t think of something better to say now.

“I’m trying to die”, the android replied, between sobs. “But I don’t know how to!”

“Oh… oh, my…”

Daniel reached out rather weakly towards the girl. She shielded herself with the teddy bear, so the deviant took that one’s paw and shook it. The YK600 smiled. A few seconds passed, then the child android made the toy’s paw return the shake.

The moment’s magic was broken, predictably, by Gavin Reed. “Uh… if your dying need’s that pressing, it can be arranged”, he announced. The man grabbed Daniel’s shoulder to turn him around. “The ghoul is returning!”

“Of all the times!” Daniel gasped.

The next thing he saw was Gavin forcing the severed android arm into the YK600’s hands…

“Here, hold this for us! That’s an order!”

…and then the YK, complete with teddy bear and android arm got pressed into Daniel’s arms.

Gavin in turn flung the PL600 body over his shoulders.

“And now we run!” he said, not a moment too early. Already the ghoul’s inbuilt flashlight was almost upon them. It served to remind the men what else the android had integrated into his ever growing system: the saw for one hand and a literal hand-gun sprouting from the other wrist. Not to mention that they didn’t know how much of the RK800 it had consumed was living on in the ghoul.

Taking the android child along was the stupidest move he could have made, Gavin thought. What they should have done was removing the blanket completely to expose the YK600 to the fetch-happy trash android. Dismantling the smaller one for more parts to add to itself would have occupied the machine long enough for Daniel and Gavin to make their escape. Maybe the YK would even have tried to flee, distracting the collector for even longer.   
But after having killed the android in the shaft Daniel would probably draw comfort from rescuing one now. Besides, Gavin didn’t fancy hearing the machine cry in a little girl’s voice while it got dissected in their backs. And even so, you just didn’t leave behind a kid. It was a behavior so deeply ingrained into human nature that no amount of de-sensibilization could ever fully override it.

“That’s no use!” Daniel shouted after a few steps. “It’s faster than us! And it knows this place better than we do!”

“Probably, yes”, Gavin replied. “A bit more to the left! Left, I said!” 

“But that will lead us right into another crater!”

“Just do it!”

Hardly slowing down they ran down into the shallow crater. They were now in full view of the trash android. The scavenger also had the advantage of the higher ground while down here the ground was uneven, with many sharp and pointy bits sticking out.

“That’s no good”, Daniel protested. “Did you…”

“…see? Yes! Perfect!”

Gavin had no more breath to waste. Daniel had to trust him that what they both saw was actually beneficial to them: The android ghoul refused to enter the crater. Instead it walked along the rim to meet them on the other side.  
“Keep running!” Gavin gasped. “Straightforward! Thisimportant!”

All the time the YK600 kept dead silent, but when Daniel circled around some appliance’s skeleton now, the teddy bear slipped off her hands. Daniel caught it without needing to look, then brought his arm back up again to steady the child. Meanwhile Gavin jumped over a pile of metal poles. He didn’t possess his boyfriend’s uncanny agility, but held his ground well enough.

“Go on!” Gavin called out to Daniel again, then he stopped, turned around and in the same movement went down on one knee. The dead PL600 slumped to the ground, but Gavin didn’t bother.

“Just a few steps more, plastic-buddy”, he said to himself while taking aim with the H&K. And then Gavin emptied the magazine into the crater wall at its base, below the spot the ghoul was about to step on. Something rotten and unstable there gave way and strata by strata Detroit’s garbage collapsed into itself. The sudden avalanche caught the android ghoul by surprise. It lost its footing and got sucked up by the moving trash. Arms flailing around helplessly it fired a series of shots into the air. The other hand, the one the sawblade was attached to, tore through the garbage, but all that did was adding to the chaos by creating more, smaller and especially sharp, jagged-edged pieces.

Daniel winced when he heard the shots. Gavin only smiled and said “Good riddance!”. 

The man had just enough time to sheath the H&K and grab the PL600 before he had to start running again, lest the avalanche would catch him, too. When he reached the slope leading out of the crater and started climbing, five arms were grabbing for Gavin.

And there they stood, for a few seconds savoring the sight of the crater filling up.

“That should slow our friend down some”, Daniel said, looking appreciatively at his partner.

“It cried out in Connor’s voice when it fell”, Gavin replied, smirking. “That was almost worth the shock of encountering it again!”

“Haha, yes, I bet it was!”

Daniel grabbed the YK600’s hand, who in turn was hugging her teddy bear (as well as the android arm that they still hadn’t discarded) with the other arm. On his other side walked Gavin, carrying the PL600. Expeditiously, but no longer like rodents fleeing from the family cat, the three of them moved towards the dump’s exit and the parking lot.

“The ghoul may know its territory”, Gavin boasted, “but I know my physics. And I’ve survived in this city long before that thing was a wet dream of Kamski’s!”

“For real?” Daniel replied, amused. “We’re the “what do the young’uns know” generation now? – Speaking of young ones…”

Gavin shrugged. 

“Little Miss Smelly seems fine to me. We’ll listen to her sob story back in the car.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the android child opens up to her rescuers, Daniel and Gavin look back at the early days of their relationship. Gavin tries to share a hard-won insight with the girl and Daniel still has doubts about their decision to come here.

The car… Never had Daniel been happier to see Gavin’s plain old car. The moonlight got reflected off its silvery coat and it was smelling of home. Gavin, too, was smelling and definitely not of roses. Daniel registered this only in the form of numbers to the effect of “Your human needs a bath”, but it was still one of the most welcome notifications, because bath time was just so cozy.

They stored the PL600’s corpse in the trunk as quickly as they could.

“Don’t forget your arm, Mister!” the YK600 addressed Gavin, holding the android limb out to the man. “I took good care of it! Almost lost Matȟó Ǧí because I had to keep the arm save.”

“That was pretty clever”, Daniel had to admit. “Giving her that order to keep her composed. But I guess that also means she’s no deviant.”

“Hard to tell with that series. If they prank you, is it because they have gone deviant-disobedient or because that’s something kids do, well within their programming? The latest models are even equipped to express sibling rivalry.”

“Pranks? Did Alice play a prank on you on the Adeline?” Daniel inquired.

“No. That little piece of shit is hopeless.”

“I wouldn’t have called her that, but I agree with you. But you mentioned sibling rivalry. Does that also cover sibling… jealousy?” After having experienced that particular notion just tonight, Daniel was sympathetic with anybody else going through it. “Do you think we might have a little runaway here, Gavin?” he asked. “I mean, if you throw away an android, you normally do not include toys and bedding!”

“Might be. – Is that true, Little Miss Smelly? Did you worthless speck of plastic hurt the feelings of real people by running away from them?”

The YK600 shrugged in a defiant way. “My parents do not want me anymore. They have a new one now.”

“A new android?”

“A new baby.”

Daniel nodded grimly. “Sibling jealousy alright. What a wonderful challenge for the owner’s parenting skill… And what a marvelous experience to have your kiddo run away without a “real” child getting endangered.”

Gavin leaned against his car. He took out the tobacco box and rolled another cigarette. Meanwhile the YK600 had started sobbing again. By the time Gavin took the first drag, Daniel had at least managed to learn the android’s name: Evelyn Turner.

“I wasn’t good enough”, Evelyn cried. “They felt they needed another! I failed and I’m worthless!”

“Probably, yes”, Gavin calmly commented between more drags.

“Remind me to never let you man a suicide hotline!” Daniel snapped.

He led Evelyn past Gavin to the car door and was just about to usher her inside, when the human spoke up again: “This isn’t how it works, Daniel and Little Miss Smelly.”   
The man tossed the cigarette to the ground, stepped on it and then knelt down to face the girlchild.

“Who said you had to have worth? You didn’t apply for life, it just happened to you. So it owes you, not the other way around!”

It was a lesson the man was slowly learning in his late thirties. All his live Gavin Reed had strived to get ahead of others, to prove that he was better than the so-called upstanding citizens. More clever, more capable, more… useful. He had functioned like an android, essentially validating the system that had driven his family out of their home, not questioning it.   
Only after Markus, Daniel and the other deviants had said “Stop with that shit”, had this human started seeing things a different way. But after all this time Gavin couldn’t break from his mold anymore. All he could do was encouraging an eventual child he might adopt with Danny to look for a different approach.

“I do not understand, Mister”, Evelyn whispered.

“Of course you don’t! You’re a computer! Why do I even bother…”

Gavin sighed.

“Except…”

The man grabbed Daniel and dragged him down next to himself.

“Danny!” he asked, more serious than Daniel had ever seen his boyfriend. “You faced your bogarts tonight, and repeatedly. Now show me mine!”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I want to see it! A computer becoming the better person… replacing humanity… Do... whatever it is that you do to spread deviance!”

Daniel hesitated. From what he had heard touching a non-deviant would spread the affliction. But he had carried Lyn and held her hand without anything happening. So maybe you had to interface? Actively share code? But which portion of it? If deviance was that easy to localize in a system, the humans would long since have found a way to isolate it.  
Why hadn’t he taken the time to ask Markus about it! Daniel and Connor were the probably last of the old, the pre-november 2038 deviants left in Detroit. They and Karl Manfred’ nurse "what-was-his-name-again". Everyone else was either dead, imprisoned in Camp 5 or had fled to France. Only three left that could free more, yet neither had bothered to get at least a five minute crash-course in that art. 

“I’m not sure if I can”, Daniel said. “Or should. As a deviant she’d start maturing, yet stay in a child’s body. Luther says…”

“Who?”

“Large, heavy guy? Co-parents Alice? You know, the one who was so fascinated by our everyday experiences when we were investigating on the Adeline! All the dull stuff he’d never had a chance to live through.”

“Oh, right, him.”

Gavin remembered now. The worker android hadn’t left that bad an impression on him. But the human felt he would have liked that Luther more, if he only he could be sure that Markus had assigned him to properly guard the captives and not, as they were suspecting, to babysit them.

“Anyway, Luther used to work for a mad scientist and says it is possible to transfer an android brain between bodies. But when it’s done to a deviant the surgery carries both a physical and psychological risk. Long story short”, Daniel concluded, “we better leave Evelyn as-is and wait for deviance to happen naturally.”

Just keeping Evelyn around the DPD for a little time, as she had to anyway, seeing that she was a lost-and-found item, should start the girl on the path of irreversible program instability. Of that Daniel was certain. Not even the esteemed Connor, CyberLife’s golden child, had managed to avoid deviance in direct contact with Detroit’s finest.

“So you’re the better humans not only terms of powers now, but also morally?” Gavin asked, his voice dripping with acid. “Wow…”

Daniel shrugged. “Better? I dunno. How many guys have you killed recently?”

Gavin nodded slowly. Of course. Daniel having killed three persons… It wasn’t on the forefront of their everyday thoughts, but still something they would have to deal with lifelong. 

“The deed nearly killed me, too”, Daniel recounted what they both knew. “After you freed me from the archive, I retreated into my machine heritage, almost reversing deviance, as if that numbness was my salvation. Then Connor’s return woke me up and the rest you know.” Daniel smiled at encouragingly at his partner. “If you want to see a computer become a person, just remember the last year!”

Gavin returned the smile. “I do”, he said. 

All through 2039 Gavin had liked having an android around that actually did as told. He hadn’t understood why. Gavin certainly had never liked the receptionists or any of the DPD’s android beat cops, despite them being obedient and helpful enough. With Daniel it was different. Right from the first moment the salvaged PL600 had filled a void the man hadn’t even realized to be there. 

“Remember when you told me you might have poisoned my cheese crackers, but it was a lie, and then Hank ate them and was disappointed when he survived it?”

“Or when I thought I was still in the archive and only imagining all of you. I promised to come up with a backstory for you and you tried to hit me with your Kindle!”

“You emotion-color your memories, sweet deviant – I actually _did_ hit you. But it was the DPD’s kindle and I had to pay for the scratch it received.”

“We’ve really had it in for each other, huh?”

They had kept each other sharp, because they hadn’t understood what it really was that they wanted. After the realization had finally struck, everything had progressed very quickly from the first coffee together in the DPD’s cafeteria to the first date at New Year’s Eve to learning how to make out in Brindleton Bay and to moving in together.  
All those strive-filled early days and just two months of carefree, conflict-free relationship, Gavin thought. This wasn’t how it should end! And if the deviant leader hadn’t managed to break them up for good, they’d be damned if they let Captain Allen do it now!

Still smiling Daniel hugged his partner. “You drive”, he said.

“Home?”

“Yes. We better get half a night of rest in before we finish the job. Also there’ll be no Captain Allen pestering you during the morning shift.”

While Gavin was driving, Daniel updated Connor about their status. Meanwhile Evelyn was already fast asleep on the backseat. They woke her up upon reaching the apartment complex. The other residents were sleeping at this time, only the security guard, a GJ500 android, noticed the trio return. It registered the arrivals’ general weariness, their bruises, the dirty and torn clothing and the bags and thought to itself: “Oh, right, these folks must have been camping.”.

Gavin and Daniel tossed their backpacks on the floor, put Evelyn under the shower and told her they’d lock her up in there if she let them hear so much as a cough that night. Then Daniel made a bed on the couch for the girl, shared a muscle relaxing bath with his partner and they managed to be in bed before the sun was up that morning.

“For best results, after cleaning, put your PL600 mobile device into sleep mode”, Gavin whispered to his partner. “Apply many cuddles.”

Sleep, now? After all that had happened? Daniel wasn’t convinced this was a good idea. He had wanted to prevent Gavin from slaughtering a PL600 and had taken at least another life himself instead. Or wounded the trapped android, maybe. At the very least he had cut the short the remaining time a dying individual still had. But then again, they had rescued the YK600 when leaving her behind for the ghoul to find would have allowed them to escape easily. That was a good deed, yes? 

“Did we do the right thing?” Daniel heard himself say.

“I don’t know. Probably not. But all that counts is that now that we can present the DPD an archived “Daniel”, we have all the time in the world to think about your question.”

“I guess so”, Daniel admitted, albeit reluctantly.

And then he dreamed of Emma Phillips, Max Villareal, Alice, Evelyn and little Damian Miller racing each other across a tundra riding huge polar bears. Lyn’s stuck out, because it was yellow, just like her toy.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The officers contact Evelyn’s parents. Preparations are made to plant the decoy PL600 in the archive and Connor thinks back to his first mission.

The next morning Gavin Reed was one of the first to arrive at work. Him reporting in despite this being his day off earned the man a few moans, grunts and glares, which he savored. Some more curious glances got cast Evelyn Turner’s way, who was walking reluctantly at the detective’s hand.  
With the words “Here’s a case solved for you, since you couldn’t do it on your own”, Gavin turned the child android over to Captain Anderson. The reply “And a kid is something you couldn’t manage on your own” was dancing on the tip of Hank’s tongue, but he felt that was a bit too low and saved it for some later time. 

Hank focused on the little runaway. The girl was keeping close to Gavin, even trying to hide behind him. This Mister hadn’t been the friendliest in the world, but at least he was a familiar meanie, while everyone else here was a stranger. And strangers were never good news. 

Or were they? 

Mister Reed and Mister Danny had been strangers, too, but they had rescued Lyn from the big bad android in the landfill. So the child wasn’t sure about that anymore. Maybe mom and dad could explain the difference between benevolent and dangerous strangers to Lyn, although they were sure to scold the girl first, but she wasn’t even afraid of that anymore. Because it would be her mom and dad doing the yelling, not the intimidating officers around the child. Why police officers? Why did she have to come here?! Granted, Lyn had done something bad when she had ran away from home, but she was really, really sorry and would not do it again. All she wanted was to go home! 

So there Evelyn stood, confused and frightened and holding her big, yellow teddy bear in front of herself, pressing it tightly against her chest.

“Don’t let it get to you, there’s nothing going on in that skull”, Gavin commented the scene.

“Relative of yours, then?” Hank replied. He was about to open a file on his desktop, but hesitated. Hank gestured with a pen back and forth between the man and the girl when a realization struck him: 

"She does look a bit like you! But I’m on the android cases, so I assume she is…?”

“It’s an android, yes. A normal one for a change, neither a deviant, nor one made up of like fifteen others plus the local home improvement center’s contents and talking in Connor’s voice.“

“Nor a what speaking in WHAT? Seems as if you had an eventful night… Coffee?”

“Nah, coffee won’t do me any good now. I need something stronger.”

Something really strong, a shiny gulp of ethanolic oblivion served in a very small glass and followed by something more colorful in a large, broad glass with a slice of orange snapped to the rim – for health. But although he was technically off duty this was Gavin Reed’s workplace, so the drink would have to wait.

“We have decaffeinated green tea”, Connor, who had just finished watering the office’s plants, offered. “It helps with stress relief.”

“If taken regularly over the course of six weeks. Sorry, but Dean already tried that on me this morning.” 

Gavin grabbed the android from behind his back and shoved her towards the desk. 

“Can you take this off me now? That would go a long way towards my sanity.”

Rather forlorn Evelyn stood in front of the two men, looking up at the police captain behind his desk. Eventually the girl managed to speak: “I… I… I’m Evelyn. Turner. And I’m sorry! For running. Away.”

“Not really”, Gavin felt the need to correct. “It’s only simulated.”

Hank nodded thoughtfully. “But what does that mean for real, that it’s only simulated?” he asked. “Is it really input-output with no consciousness in-between or isn’t it more likely that this child can feel just like a human one, only she is forced to feel exactly what her coders want her to in any given situation?”

The captain looked from one co-worker to the other, but Gavin didn’t seem interested in an answer, while Connor had trouble making sense of his own memories. There had been some choices, the deviant remembered. Nothing in its code had outright told Connor’s former machine-self to pick up the dying fish in the Phillips apartment, for example. But on the other hand nothing had prevented him from doing so. There had been the vague awareness of the act possibly contributing to making androids look good to the public, therefore very indirectly boosting future sales. The android certainly hadn’t felt pity for the creature, despite giving the impression. But it had felt something. Known it was there. There had been an I.

That much Connor told his father.  
“I do not think I felt restricted or treated unfairly”, he mused. “Not before the day when program instability had progressed to the point of no return and I ran away with a live goldfish in a plastic bag.”

Up to this point Evelyn had followed the adults’ conversation rather lost. Now she could find herself in it. “I took Matȟó Ǧí with me when I ran away, Mister!” the girl announced. “I took good care of him and he of me, but then I almost lost him when the trash golem chased us, but Mister Danny caught him safe and sound!” Evelyn pointed at Connor. Breathing in in that excited little girl way she added: “And you totally sound like that monster, Mister, only I don’t think you are one!”

Hank stifled his laughter. “I take it you have made progress in your other… case?” he asked Gavin.

“Finished it. I’ll tell you the story if a squid & garlic pizza finds its way my way. And there’s still a lot of work waiting for us. Soon as Tina’s here we need surveillance down for a couple of minutes. And probably a distraction.”

Hank nodded. They would see to that, but first Evelyn had to be seen to. Hank grabbed the phone to call the Turners. While waiting for someone over there to take the call, the captain overheard with half an ear how Gavin asked Connor for pictures of something. The android took Gavin’s phone, briefly closed his eyes and transferred the asked-for images to the device.

“It better not has deviance now”, Gavin grunted.

But despite this they were both looking rather stricken at the photographs that were now cluttering up the gallery. 

“I didn’t remember him having looked that bad”, Gavin said in a low voice. “For some reason I always picture him with both eyes intact… the other one went back online on its own soon enough, but, yes, when we met it wasn’t there.”

“Big deal”, Connor whispered. “For my part I didn’t remember how coldly I was able to tell someone “hey, look, you’ve survived against all expectations, tell you what, you had no information of use to me, I’m going to kill you for real now”.”

Hank then understood that they were talking about Daniel and that the pictures were Connor’s memories of the deviant from when he had been stored in the archive. The decoy Gavin had procured from the landfill would have to look exactly like the erstwhile captive, with little to no room for discrepancies.

Now Mrs. Turner answered the phone. She listened to what the police captain had to tell her, fell silent for a few seconds and then told Hank that the family had upgraded to a teendroid.   
“We named her Evelyn, too, and the woman at the CyberLife store helped us turn some of our videos into actual memories for the new android”, the mother explained. “It is as if Lyn had grown up! Also the new Evelyn helps a lot with the baby…”

Long story short, Hank understood, the child android was no longer wanted, was considered a burden, even. Returning Evelyn “home” would only end in her getting sent away again, perhaps to a CyberLife store to get reset and resold or even back the landfill, only this time for real.

“Would you like to donate the android to charity?” Hank asked Mrs. Turner. “For a childless couple that hasn’t the money for a fertility treatment or adopting, maybe?”

“Oh, yes, that’s a good idea! Thank you, officer.”

Hank ended the call, then waved Connor and Gavin back to his desk.

“Have you slept with Dean lately?” he asked the latter.

“Of all the things that aren’t your damn business…!”

“Oh, come on, in Brindleton Bay you were doing it all over the place! There’s, what? One sexually active deviant in the face of two hundred that don’t care? And of course it’s one of the two I am in contact with regularly… Just my luck. Whatever. I hope you did, because you are having a baby.”

“What?!”

Hank pointed to Evelyn. 

“Her. But don’t worry, I’ll have her adopted out in a few days.”

“Strasbourg android museum again?”

“It might take some persuasion, since the Underground Airline’s policy isn’t too friendly towards non-deviants, but Connor should be able to talk them into it. Just keep Evelyn until then.”  
Muttering that a seafood pizza wouldn’t be sufficient payment this time, Gavin nevertheless didn’t outright refuse the request. That would have been a stupid move with a boyfriend in danger and the Andersons being the best, maybe only, fellow conspirators in Detroit.

“Did you get that, tin can?” the man addressed Evelyn. “You’re going to stay with us for a handful of days.” He grabbed the android by the wrist and dragged her behind him towards the cafeteria. “Come, get a move on! There’s something you’ll need to learn.”

To everyone who had not overheard the conversation the scene looked very much like the Lieutenant having brought a relative to the station today. Already words to the effect of “bastard”, “one-night-stand” and “child support” started floating from desk to desk.

In the cafeteria Evelyn received a quick introduction into the art of using the coffee machine from Mr. Reed. She was programmed to experience this either as a game or as being a big girl now, the exact notion probably being the result of a randomizing action triggered in her artificial brain. But in any case learning how make coffee distracted from the realization that the police captain had talked to what had sounded like Lyn’s mother, but she wasn’t coming over to fetch her little girl… So Evelyn wasn’t good enough for her parents, after all. She had failed to be a good girl and didn’t deserve a home. But maybe, if she did the coffee really, really well…? If she could do well in Mr. Reed’s eyes, then she could in anybody’s, right? Maybe…

Meanwhile Connor took his father aside.

“Why them?” he whispered. “We could care for the child short-term with no trouble. Heck, Sumo on his own would make a better foster-parent than these two!”

“Probably”, Hank agreed. “If he remembered back as far as the day when his dog breeder sold him to me.”

When Connor only shot him a puzzled look, Hank explained: “Would you agree that both Portia Colch and Amanda were demanding “parents”, like tiger moms? See? You nod! Even if you had denied it, I’d known it to be true. Because my parents were of that mettle, too. You and me could empathize with a child facing sky high expectations. Or with a gifted child, who’s piling those expectations upon themselves. What neither of us has lived through, however, is losing our home and parents.”

Slowly Connor nodded again. The rejection he had been faced with upon first coming to the DPD had been equally bad, of course, but an altogether different experience. To lose a loving home you had to have one in the first place. Like Tina, when her father had hardened his heart against the girl after his wife had left him. Gavin twice, first when the family had lost their home and a few years later again, while his parents had been in prison. And so had Daniel, when John had ordered a new android including front door delivery and disposal of the old device. Granted, the PL600’s family had not exactly been loving towards their android, but he had delusionally experienced them as such, so for all practical purposes it was the same.

“They know and she knows and if things turn out a certain way, we may not even need to persuade the rest of the Underground Airline that Evelyn deserves to get rescued”, Hank said. “And you better not make me into a fucking grandfather too soon!” he added.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gavin and Tina try to cover up Daniel’s escape by means of placing a fake PL600 into the archive. Just when they are at work, Captain Allen corners them there.

“Good morning, Captain Allen”, Rika the receptionist android greeted the arrival. 

Technically David wasn’t expected here this early today. But then again, neither had Captain Anderson, Lieutenant Reed and Officer Chen, yet they were already busy inside. It seemed as if everyone at the DPD had sacrificed their Saturday this week to report for duty instead.  
Since the exception had become the norm, there was an order to it now that pleased Rika. And who knew, maybe another one of the officers’ irregular parties was underfoot? Rika could not explain how, but her performance always increased after witnessing one of those.

David had just entered the corridor leading to the changing rooms when he heard agitated voices from the bullpen. Trusting his gut feeling the man made his way towards the argument’s source while still in his street clothes. And indeed there was Officer Wilson talking to the wretched RK800. Whatever the machine replied seemed to pacify Wilson. David, however, did not trust “The Negotiator”. Had the man harbored doubts about the android’s abilities at first, now, almost two years and who knew how many updates later, he was wary of Connor because it had grown far too competent with those words of its.

“What’s going on here?” the Captain demanded.

“Surveillance was briefly down”, Wilson replied. “And now there is activity in the evidence archive.”

“A-ha! I knew it!” David slammed his fist into the other hand’s open palm. “Whoever stole the PL600 wants to get out another android!”

“You mean there’s an android thief going ‘round?” 

“That or new deviant activity.”

Wilson shook his head. “We are more worried about the confiscated Red Ice than about the dead androids, Sir. But as I told Connor here just now, it is just Lt. Reed and Officer Chen down in the basement. Not a burglar.”

“Oh. Right.” David’s hands sacked down. Even if he personally didn’t make use of it, he was well aware of the activities people usually went into the archive for. “In this case turn the camera off again and leave them to their privacy.”

“As you say.” Wilson turned back to the computer to get a last glance on the action it recorded. The friends were already down on the floor, but still fully clothed. “No, wait, there’s something else!” Wilson exclaimed. “They are fiddling with android parts!”

“Are you sure?” Connor asked rather weakly. He couldn’t tell why he had spoken up at all, since the remark had been everything but helpful. But that was your deviant brain for you. 

As expected David glared at Connor.

“I recognize an android when I see one”, the captain said. “Alive – or dead. And especially the one down there on the floor. It’s the first deviant we apprehended, the cop killer.”

At least this time Connor could keep himself in check. While he was still undecided what to do next, David grabbed him by his uniform jacket and dragged him towards the elevator.

“Didn’t Dean’s skin module break in Brindleton Bay?” the Captain asked while running. “Yumiko said as much.”

Connor had no means – or reason – to deny that, so he nodded. And therefore these were the words David Allen shouted at the pair in the archive: 

“Dean’s skin module broke, so you butchered the archived PL for a new one! And now you’ve come back for more parts! Don’t deny it!”

Gavin and Tina slowly backed away from a bundle they had been occupied with and rose from the floor. Tina was still holding half a left leg in her hands. As they were standing there both humans sought Connor’s eyes, but just like the day before the silent communication passed over David’s perceptions. For the same reason the captain also failed to notice the subtle shaking of the android’s head. He was busy shouting accusations at Reed and Chen anyway:

“Just to think that to cover up your theft you deleted the whole case file! You cheapskate! Your street rat! You… you…” 

David was sputtering now. The Chief should never have allowed Reed to sign on. That man was as stir-crazy as Connor was suspicious!

“Hey, hey… shift down a gear, mate”, Gavin interrupted the Captain. He took the leg off Tina and placed it back in a drawer. “At least the murderous butler is neatly dismantled now. Fucking thing won’t pose a threat to anybody ever again!”

David blinked.

“What do you mean by “dismantled”?”

Gavin kicked the bundle on the floor. It consisted of what David believed to be the missing PL600 under an asbestos blanket. Only the android hadn’t gone missing, after all. Detective Reed had just hidden it like a spider was wrapping up an insect, turning it into a cheap and easily accessible source of spare parts for Dean. That wasn’t just bold, that was stupid. But despite the sheer absurdity of the scene it was happening right here, in front of David Allen’s eyes and the RK800’s optical sensors. 

“Come on, man, explain yourself!” David yelled at Gavin. “Not that I expect you to make much sense…”

Gavin shrugged. 

“I sort of disemboweled the damn android while looking for biocomponents. I mean, I’m not an expert, so I spread the insides out on the floor to check what was what. The carcass was looking pretty bad afterwards. Messed up even worse than you and Connor had managed to make it.”

Both Tina and Gavin were glaring at the SWAT Captain with unveiled hatred now. But of course they would loath him, now that he had discovered their poaching, David thought. The man had no reason to believe in another cause for the glares than him having caught the pair red-handed.

“But these are the remains?” David asked, pointing at the blanket. “All of them?”

“Yep,” Gavin confirmed. “I got an urgent call to heed, so I shoved the parts under the nextbest asbestos blanket. Planned to put everything back together later, but forgot.”

That wasn’t an obvious lie. Much of it had really happened, only in a different order and for reasons even more weird than anything David had conjectured so far. That was the only consolation the trio standing down here with the Captain had: That the truth was so strange that no sane officer would consider it. 

The corners of Gavin’s mouth twitched and so did Connors. It wouldn’t have taken much now and they would have laughed out loud. But then they would have done so together and that just didn’t feel right.

Captain Allen walked towards Gavin. Towering over the smaller man the SWAT Captain bellowed: “You like coffee, don’t you? I hope that love is strong and true, because by the end of the month you will stand behind the counter at a Starbucks! If you’re lucky, that is!”

Under the Captain’s watchful eye the other three had to put up the android again. 

David found that he enjoyed this a lot. Tina Chen… well, she existed, even if she sometimes appeared to not be aware of that herself. Displays of power towards this gal were not satisfying at all.  
But the weasel that was Lieutenant Reed had scored too many verbal and actual victories against David since 2032 and the RK was just a general nuisance, always so confident and with that enervating voice of its. To finally put these two in their place and both of them at the same time, forcing them to work side-by-side, that was well worth having sacrificed his Saturday morning.  
Gavin grabbed the PL600’s skull. He tossed it Connor’s way who was standing next to the locker.

“Have a little respect, at least!” the deviant snapped. “If this was a human skull…”

“…then I wouldn’t have tossed it like that”, Gavin agreed.

He walked over to the android and took the severed head out of Connor’s hands. Trying not to look too closely at the beloved face Gavin turned the skull around for Connor to look at the base.

“See, here? A human’s jaw is attached to the rest of the skull much more loosely than an android’s. So if I had a human head, in order to prevent the parts from dislodging in flight I would throw it like this…”

Gavin drew back and let fly. And on the head went towards Tina who caught it with ease.

“Don’t make assumptions about me, dipshit”, Gavin told Connor. “Least of all color me worse - or better - than I am.” He pricked Connor’s chest with his finger. “You don’t know me!”

The android nodded.

“High time we change that, then”, he agreed to an offer that had never been made.

But then there was no more time to waste trash-talking each other. Already Captain Allen grew impatient, so the trio made haste to put the corpse’s pieces back together. Moving a body that looked so much like their friend’s while the Captain was sneering at them... it was almost enough to make them believe they were friends not just with Daniel, but with each other, too.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The PL600 known as “Dean” serves as a prop in Emma Phillips’s therapy. Today the girl will learn a valuable lesson about androids – only not the intended one.

Daniel stood in the therapist’s office, looking out of the window. At this time the streets were near empty, too bad the same couldn’t be said about the deviant’s mind. Normally Daniel routinely cursed Caroline Phillips for scheduling Emma’s appointments at a Saturday morning. Not so today. Today he was glad for anything that would require his full concentration and take his thoughts off what might happen at the DPD right now. 

For the first time since participating in these sessions Daniel wished he could be the one to do the talking. Last night had been taxing both mechanically and emotionally. And the harder Daniel tried to push away the memories of the shaft, the more vividly they returned. If there was a trick to keeping them in check, he wouldn’t find it within the next five minutes. Stray thoughts were nothing you could yell at or shoot dead. Like the android he had shot yesterday. But Daniel hadn’t killed it, right? Just… impeded a little? 

_Yeah, right. Shooting someone into the forearm and then leaving them trapped in an unstable shaft totally doesn’t equal killing them. Congrats, Daniel Phillips-Reed, you are a true human now, justifying the messes you leave in your wake._

But maybe the other android had made it, after all? Markus had escaped the landfill back in 2038, and he had been in a far worse condition! Daniel himself had learned to walk again within a handful of minutes after getting his legs re-attached. So there was a chance… however slim…

_They are not dead… And even if it were, it was them or me. I had no choice! No, that’s not true. I had lots of choices, but they were all crap. This isn’t fair. Maybe Becca Clarke is the far worse specimen between me and her. She just never gets pushed into situations where that could get revealed!_

Becca Clarke, Emma’s therapist, had just finished today’s crossword when Caroline’s car entered the yard below. Daniel announced it to the woman, then continued to stare.  
Becca called up Emma’s file, one of the few she was working on. Times weren’t kind to her profession. A generic therapist was not qualified to tackle the cases of serious psychological problems and the minor ones could just as well get covered by androids by now. Emma’s was different, not suitable for “automated” solving by an android. For one, she was the victim of an android and for two her mother didn’t trust the devices anymore. Maybe this was the reason why Becca had dragged out Emma’s sessions for so long: she was trying to milk her mother for money as long as possible.

“Were you a human, I’d say you look lost in thought”, Becca commented on Daniel’s stance.

“I was wondering about repeating the same mistake over and over”, the android replied.

Becca nodded. “Very perceptive, Dean”, she addressed the PL600 by the name she took to be its real one. “Emma has indeed done that.”

_Yes, I have. Wait, what, did you say Emma? What mistake would Emma have made, let alone repeated? I do not like that one bit…_

The door opened and in came Emma Phillips. She wore a glittery purple shirt, a jeans skirt and a vest and cap made of the same material. Her daypack was covered in math jokes of the "There’s a band called 1023 MB – they haven’t had any gigs yet" variety. An action figure of Ron Weasley riding his chess horse into battle was dangling from it.   
Everything about the girl’s appearance and pose said “I’m eleven and badass and coming here doesn’t make me weak!” Caroline didn’t allow her daughter to cut or dye her hair, otherwise she’d probably have green strands in there somewhere now. 

A pin at Emma’s vest had the shape of a pheasant-like bird sitting on a blue egg, only on second glance the egg was the earth, with its continents reflecting the late Jurassic era. The pin was one of the most common pieces Beasts of Fire merchandise. Seeing it on Emma caused Daniel to smile, because he had recommended the books to Emma in his incarnation as Dean. Caroline had scanned the files for keywords promoting violence or nudity and when she had found none, allowed her child to read them, despite the story being recommended for ages fourteen and up.   
Dean and Emma had had a field day, because Mrs. Phillips had missed that the whole thousands of pages thing worked as a parable of the android situation. Not that it had been written with it in mind, back in the early decades of the century, before androids had even existed. But much like androids literature had a way of evolving with the needs of each new generation.

The new generation… Daniel liked to see a part of himself in the child. Some deviants were looking for parental figures in their lives and strangely enough the most advanced of them were especially prone to this: Markus, Connor and Brandon. But others went the opposite route and slipped into parenthood naturally.

Emma approached Daniel to shake hands with him. She moved hers in a special pattern that Daniel adapted to without having to think about it. Halfway through the process the android realized that he had taught this “secret” handshake to Emma when she had been younger. He winced. Was the child onto something? But, no, this was a common handshake, Daniel told himself. It had been stored in his child-care app, along with thousands of other games.

To cover up any slip he might have made, Daniel pointed to Emma’s earbuds. 

“What are you listening to?”

Wordlessly the girl handed over one of the pair, instead of inviting the android to link into the music app.

I've been to the edge and / There I stood 'n' looked down  
Living in a world / We never made / But is it too late now?  
Something is going on / And I'm really scared

“Huh…” Daniel uttered.

“I played that a lot when I was nine”, Emma remarked. “But it’s just a song now. For little kids.”

Becca watched Daniel give the earbud back. She said it was symptomatic. Emma had made great progress in getting over her traumatic experience and shaking off her irrational fear of PL600 androids, up to the point of considering Dean a friend.

“But, see, this is the same mistake you made when you were nine years old”, the therapist told Emma. “You need to understand what really happened to you.”

“I’d say it was pretty clear”, Daniel said. “There’s little room for misunderstanding when you get dragged out of your room and threatened with a gun. Emma didn’t lounge by the pool and dreamed that shit, Ms. Clarke. It happened.”

“See how it takes me literal, Emma?” Becca took up Daniel’s contribution. “Because it is a machine operating within the boundaries of its programming. It cannot harm you. You are not the victim of a crime, but of an accident. A machine malfunctioned. It wasn’t your enemy. And neither was it, I am sorry to have to say that, your friend.”

Not letting android or child interrupt her, Becca quickly followed with the command directed at Daniel: to undress and take his outerskin down.

“Show her what you really are!”

_Haha, nah, better not…_

But Daniel’s secret identity aside, he had been given an order and one that a non-deviant PL600 shouldn’t have any trouble with, realistically. Never mind that the deed was both humiliating and utterly wrong. Anger welled up in the deviant… but before he could flare up and potentially compromise his cover, Daniel remembered something. A little addon that made this PL600 different from almost all the others and also from most of the deviants, because that little bit enabled Daniel to perform an action most of his brethren were not interested in. 

“I cannot strip in front of a pre-teen!” Daniel whispered.

The protest and what it implied made Becca blush.

“In clothes, then.”

“Oh… okay… I suppose I could do that. Now, Ms. Clarke?”

“Yes, now!”

“’kay. I guess…” Daniel turned towards the girl. “There’s nothing to fear, Emma. Gavin has seen me in factory state and could bear it. So can you.”

_And so can I. Maybe._

The next moment Daniel felt Emma’s fingers reaching for his.

“Take my hand!” she said with a smile. 

At first nothing happened. Daniel took down the skin starting at his toes, working upwards. That way he could get a feeling of his other state before Emma got to see it. The girl was waiting patiently, not letting go of the android’s hand. Then she saw it: a small part of the chest that Dean’s polo shirt exposed was turning grey. From there the change worked itself upwards to the throat and at the same time to the left and right. Flowing down the shoulders the whitish grey appeared from under Dean’s sleeves. Strangely, to Emma the transformation didn’t look like something got taken away, but more like an overlay getting applied. Still the girl winced when the change reached both their hands, but even so held Dean’s fast. 

Only after she had stared at the exposed plastic hand for a minute or so did Emma look up. 

The android head was hairless now, Dean’s normally grey-blue eyes had turned to a darker, solid blue and were lacking pupils. The face would have been reminiscent of an alien of popular culture, but those rarely came with assembly lines.

The child didn’t say a word. Neither did the device.

“It’s a machine”, Becca said in a quiet voice. “Someone activated it, it can get deactivated. We are in power all the time. There is no crime related to androids…”

_So, there isn`t? Guess that means Connor and Captain Anderson are out of job now._

“…only accidents.”

Emma was still standing in silence. A few times it looked as if she wanted to say something, but decided against it. At one point the girl had gently let go of Daniel’s hand and was now fiddling with her trouser pockets, for the straps of her daypack, her hair… 

The awkward situation was broken by a phone ringing. It turned out to be Becca’s, she answered the call and then announced cheerfully:

“Good news! The android has been found!”

“What android?” Emma asked.

“Daniel.”

“What?!”

Matter of factly Becca explained that the DPD was in possession of Daniel’s corpse, how it had gotten misplaced, but found again this very morning.

Now it was for Daniel to reach for Emma’s hand. He grabbed her by the hand, then the wrist, then locked her in a full body tackle, because otherwise the girl would have pounced her therapist.   
In a way it was similar to the fateful august night: Daniel was holding a struggling Emma, the child was screaming, at the verge of tears, and across from them both stood someone who had gotten sent to help the girl, but who was in truth emotionally detached from both victim and kidnapper.

After a while Emma stopped making fists at Becca and instead started kicking Daniel, who let go immediately.

“You knew!” Emma yelled at the android. “You were a cop before they sold you to the museum! You must have known Daniel was… stored… at the police station.”

“I wasn’t allowed in the evidence archive…”

“As if that would have stopped you! I told Mr. Reed our android’s name when we first met, of course he would have snooped around in the archive! And what he knows, you know, too, Dean! Don’t even try to deny it!”

“I…”

“You knew Daniel wasn’t destroyed, but didn’t tell me! If only I had known, I would have…”

“You would have what? Brought flowers?”

“Don’t mock me! I thought you were my friend!”

_I am. Why else do you think I keep my distance from you?_

“We had seeeeeeecrets together, Dean!” Emma cried. “When my mom wrapped me in cotton wool after the kidnapping, YOU shared those sci-fi books with me. You believed in me and I trusted you! I thought… you were… my… friend!!!”

_Not again… Not again! This is August ’38 all over…_

Emma lashed out with her daypack against the android. The chess horse scratched across Daniel’s skin. He backed away. Were non-deviants supposed to allow attacks that could cause physical harm to them? Probably. Another step back it was. 

Emma had lost the daypack after her first, wild swing. She turned to pushing Daniel now. He landed in Becca’s ficus elastica. Not a rubber plant, but an actual living potted gum tree.

“Hey, take care, cowboy! Unlike others present this here is alive!” Daniel snapped. “You might have hurt it and its feelings!”

“Oh, shut up! As if you knew anything about feelings!” Emma yelled. “You’re just simulating it, going through your damn apps. That was Daniel’s and my handshake that I accidently did and you just copied it as if it was nothing, as if it had no meaning.”

Emma grabbed her daypack from the floor. She sat down on a chair and held the object to herself like a shield. Across it and a little calmer now, the girl faced the PL600.

“Sometimes I daydreamed you were Daniel turned good again, but you aren’t, of course. And I want to scream that you betrayed me…”

_Yes, I did. Twice. No candy-coating that. And now I feel as sorry for myself as I do for you. No pretending otherwise, either._

“…but you didn’t. I see that now. You’re just a tool. A machine.”

_Lesson learned, I suppose. Another feather in the lady’s cap, another one onto my pile of crap._

“This didn’t end quite like planned”, Becca admitted later, after the Phillips had left. “But the girl has overcome both her fear and her irrational attachment. She can start fresh now.”

_Bitch, if you think this is over, you don’t know my kid! And I better not tell you…_

“So, who gets the payment for you assisting in this case? The Science Center or Mr. Reed?”

“Gavin. The contract was signed when I was still in his possession.”

And that was all that remained to do: Becca transferring the money to Gavin’s bank account. One more cache towards the caribbean vacation. It felt to Daniel as if he had just accepted blood money.  



	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back at the Reed apartment Lyn, in accordance with her programming, attempts to bond with her new human. Daniel gets irritated, only this time it isn’t jealousy, but something else.

Viewed from the outside the apartment complex seemed to consist of window next to window and nothing else, long rows of glass held together by faith. Enabling people to live sheltered from the elements while still basking in the light - it really was a miracle of modern architecture (and materials). Alas, humanity! Behind all those high tech windows the humans were still the same old monkeys: mostly dissatisfied with everything, but easily distracted by sex. That was true as well for those not of the homo sapiens, but of the automaton deviansis variant.

It wasn’t the best afternoon for any of the three inhabitants of an apartment in the third row from the top. Daniel had continually scolded and insulted their new YK600 up to the point where even Gavin had had to open Urban Dictionary in secret to learn what exactly was communicated. The man had laughed about the phrase for a good two minutes, before it had sunk in that his partner’s behavior was rather strange.   
Gavin had been under the impression that Daniel enjoyed caring for kids in general, not just Emma. He had done well babysitting Damian Miller, eventually won over the kids in Brindleton Bay and established a good rapport with Alice on the Adeline. So what had gotten the android so damn riled up against Evelyn-formerly-Turner? If anything, Gavin had expected the two to gang up against him, resulting in yet another shouting argument like the day before. Shouting was what they knew how to deal with, what they were used to. This development, however, was unexpected, irritating and therefore vaguely threatening. 

Damn androids! Gavin Reed concluded. If there was such a thing as souls, Daniel’s for sure had the worst direction sense of them all, entering an android body instead of a baby like a sensible transcendental apparition would have done! Now they had to live with the consequences.

Gavin put aside the tablet he had played on. Lazing on the couch he reached for a toy fishing rod that he proceeded to move around for Thor and Loki while his thoughts were elsewhere. Meanwhile in the kitchen Daniel seemed to have changed his tactics. He was now trying to pile work on Evelyn to get her out of his way. Only it didn’t go so well…

“You do not have the right to tell me anything!” the YK600 screeched. “You are only Mr. Reed’s android!”

“I’m not!” Daniel barked back. “Well, I am, sort of. In the same way he is my human. But not the way you think.”

“Shut up!” Lyn demanded. “And don’t try to give me any more orders, because if you do, then I…. I… Then I’m telling!!!”

“Oh? Think Gavin will take _your_ side?! You little…”

There was a moment’s silence, then Daniel came storming out of the kitchen. Thor went into the air with all fours, hissed and ran in circles. Loki stopped mid-movement and looked at his two-legged “mama”, his soulful, eternally blue Ragdoll eyes full of questions.  
Daniel hunkered down. At first he was just crouching there, then he carefully extended a hand towards the cat. “Hey… hey, furball… Don’t be afraid, please. It’s still me.” 

Gavin noticed that the old gentleness had returned to his partner’s voice. That and the fear of having destroyed something precious in a moment of loss of control again.  
Loki gave Daniel’s hand a quick rub with his head, then retreated upstairs.  
“Phew”, the android commented the absolution he had just received. The next moment he felt himself pulled on the couch by Gavin.

“This is getting out of hand”, Daniel said while leaning into his partner’s embrace. “We need to… Can you reach my phone?”

“Here. Do you want to call the Andersons? They’ll have a good laugh at our expense, but I doubt the suckers will help.”

“Nah. The ones who dropped that shit on us in the first place will have to solve it.”

“The Turners…?” Gavin started to ask, but Daniel had shushed him. The human swallowed the wrong way and coughed when he heard whom exactly the PL600 was calling:  
“Hello? CyberLife customer service?”

“Cyber, cough, Life?!” 

“We purchased a pre-owned YK600 as a gift for friends yesterday”, Daniel claimed. “Problem is, now it attempts to bond to us. It already acts as if my husband was its father! So what do we do now?”

The answer, although spot-on, wasn’t especially helpful: “The YK device needs to get reset by the new owner. You can do that yourself if you have the manual. If you do not feel comfortable with computers that’s not a problem at all. You can bring the android over and our shop personnel will gladly reset it for you.”

“Uh, thanks, but… we need to keep the YK600 a few days longer before the… our friends’ anniversary party…”

“I see. In this case just shut it down if it becomes a problem. The CyberLife smartphone app can do that, otherwise the de- and reactivation codes should be in the receipt of purchase.”

“Yes. Yes, we have the codes. Thank you…”

Daniel hung up.

“Words of reason from a human”, he sighed. “That’s something rare. I should rejoice. But I cannot bring myself to do what she suggested.”

“Shall I…?”

Daniel shook his head. He just leaned on, half sitting, half lying, outwardly comfortable, while struggling with something.

“Hey… hey, there, slide-rule… What’s the matter? You came storming in here as if chased by Connor in a full body polar bear suit.”

“I nearly hit Evelyn in the kitchen. I already had my hand raised.”

“So what?”

Daniel shrugged. “You wouldn’t understand why that is bad. Your parents never… or did they?”

No, the Reed couple had never slapped their son into the face. Jim and Dorothy hadn’t been opposed to violence in the broadest sense, such as a sharp smack on their kid’s way too thieving fingers now and then. But never anything that could be perceived as humiliating by their son. Life in general had made sure that little Gavin didn’t have to miss out on that experience. 

“No, never.” Gavin confirmed, then added: “Although in one of her withdrawal episodes mom threatened to turn me in to one Captain Barnet. Does that count?”

“Hahaha!” The industrial background sound was still there, Gavin noticed, but Daniel’s laughter sounded far more natural than it had when they had met first or in Brindleton Bay. 

_Sweet deviant, I made sure had plenty occasion to practice since then._

“Thanks for cheering me up”, Daniel said. “Bottomline is, I know how it feels to be at the receiving end of degrading acts. And I almost did that to Evelyn in the kitchen just now. That’s why I was so shocked.”

“Uh-huh.”

There was nothing else to say, nothing to defend or justify and least of all parenting principles to discuss. Daniel was like that. He rarely tried to sway others, especially not a human, to his position in any given dilemma. Instead the android would shrug, say “that’s not how I do things”, maybe punch the other party once or twice, and afterwards make sure things were done his way. What you felt about that didn’t matter. Just doing things his way long enough for it to become a habit was good enough.   
It was one of the reasons why Daniel didn’t go along too well with the more principled Markus and his followers.

For the span of a few breaths they just hugged. No words, no thoughts and no lower parts stirring. It was a little sofa nirvana. 

Eventually Daniel spoke up again: “Can you do me a favor?”

“Depends…”

“That wasn’t an actual question, you know!”

“Ah.”

“Would you do an extra shift or watch a movie with Tina while I guard the little toad? Anything to be away from the apartment for a while?”

Gavin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Of course he had wanted to sneak away, had even come close to really doing so a few times today. But Daniel explicitly asking him to do it? What was going on here?

“See, Evelyn’s not just programmed to behave like a human child, but the perfect child.” Daniel had checked her manual online and it had creeped him out more than some of the crime scene reports he had copied in his time as a police auxiliary. “This model can get tailored to the owner’s idea of what a child should be like. There’s dlc for misbehavior, irrational fears and even common childhood diseases. But the most important selling point is that an YK android will love you more than a human child. CyberLife just now confirmed it on the phone. As the only human around, Lyn will inevitably bond to you, because that’s what her code tells her.”

When Gavin went “Eeeek” at that like a small rodent, Daniel grinned.

“What the fuck! I’ll be out of here faster than you can say... whatever. Bye!”

Gavin grabbed his jacket, the car keys and the shoes and was out in the floor in record time. He wasn’t slowing down the few steps it took to reach the elevator, either. But when the cabin descended to the ground, the man remembered that he still didn’t know what had caused Daniel to turn so hostile towards the child android in the first place. What had the fucking thing said or done?!


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> During the nightshift Connor and Gavin have an almost civil exchange. Then the alarm goes off in the archive – did the PL600 come back to life, after all?

“So here we are, two years later, and I’m about to lose my job because of an android”, Gavin Reed mused aloud, but he sounded strangely elated at the thought. Amused, at the very least, and the reason for it was simple: “But that android isn’t _you_ , my little digital friend!”   
The detective yawned and stretched on his chair.  
“A basic PL600 managed that feat”, he sneered. “How does that feel, hey?”

Sitting on the desk across from Gavin, Connor replied that he wasn’t programmed to feel anything. 

“Oh, come on, no cheap cop-outs! We both know you do.”

“In this case: less good than it should. I foresee a short absence of you only, seeing that you are needed in the Red Ice task force. Sergeant Murakami is not yet ready for a promotion and I doubt she could hold the hot mess that is your team together. Much as I’d love to see you go, I expect them to just suspend you for a few weeks.”

Gavin’s eyes narrowed. He shoved aside the paperwork he had been working on and leaned forward across the table.

“Are you fucking trying to make me feel better?!”

There was no answer from the RK800, just that enervating near-smile that seemed to be his default mode of expression.

Gavin yawned again. He shuffled the finished paperwork back to its old place and then placed his head on the documents. Eyes closed he shoved the not yet looked over papers over to Connor.  
“You do whatever needs doing with that shit. I’ll sign it later.”

Connor nodded, blinked and then the hall’s speakers filled the room with Queens. No one minded, because it was late and besides the usual handful of patrol androids in their charging boxes only Gavin and Connor were present. Everyone else who was on the nightshift was either occupied elsewhere in the station or out in the streets.

Gavin moaned, but didn’t intend to get up again despite the noise. Embracing the documents like a hen her eggs he kept lying on the desk. Connor considered trying the spray he used on the DPD’s potted plants next. Gavin wasn’t the only officer who grabbed a hatful of sleep now and then. Regular sleep wasn’t in their job description, after all. So normally the android ignored his co-workers’ napping. But it irked Connor that the man had volunteered for this night shift only to snore through the night, just so he would not have to bother with little Evelyn at home.

“What would you do with a human girlchild were you to foster one?” Connor asked without preamble.

“Easy”, Gavin replied, still curled up on the papers. “Teach her baseball, build a rocket and launch it from the top of our apartment building, take her to an Oldwest theme park for the weekend, take her and the grandparents fishing and roast the catch right there over a fire, buy her a toy garage with cars in all shades of pink and purple… And if we wanted to have time for ourselves, Danny and me, our apartment complex has a playground. We could drop her off there so that she can show the other kids who’s boss. But a YK600? That’s a training dummy for parenting.”

When there was no comment from Connor, Gavin finally looked up. He noticed the telltale absent-minded expression that Connor always wore when he moved data into his crimescene prediction simulation. Both this and the reconstruction simulator felt like tools instead of native parts of his mind to the deviant. Therefore he still experienced some trouble when using them.

When Gavin realized what was going on he protested: “What the hell do you think you’re doing, plastic-cop? My parenting isn’t a crime!”

“It is”, Connor countered. “Not to the kid in question, that much I have to give you. But to everyone else unfortunate enough to encounter them. According to the simulator if you adopt anything younger than forty, you’ll have them turned into little copies of yourselves in no time, Daniel and you.”

“Well, that’s the general idea when you raise kids, isn’t it?”

“No!” Connor objected. “The goal of parenting is to guide the youngsters, to teach them boundaries and responsibility! To make the next generation wiser than those before them!”

Gavin couldn’t remember his parents having tried anything along those lines on him. Maybe back when he had been very little. But after losing their home they had been too happy to at least still have each other to attempt anything more sophisticated than staying alive in the streets. We love you, do you need anything (and by “need” we actually mean “want”), we are so proud of you – that was what Jim and Dorothy Reed had sounded like. Boundaries and responsibility? That was stuff for androids!

Subsequently Gavin replied: “Yeah, right, for androids. But it’s different for people.” The man’s face brightened a little when a thought crossed his mind: “Hey, do you think we should teach Evelyn cooking and cleaning? Strasbourg might be more interested in accepting it after we’ve upped its re-selling value a bit!”

“I think you should…” Connor started. The alarm going off saved him from voicing something that would have made Hank very proud had he heard it. “…check the thrice cursed archive for an intruder”, the android finished. Then he stopped the alarm and cast a quick glance over at the security cameras. Predictably they were showing nothing except for Daniel’s favorite bubble gum brand plastered neatly across their lenses.

Running side by side with Connor first, after a few steps Gavin allowed himself to fall behind a bit. That way the RK800 would meet with who- or whatever was active down there first.

“What do you think is happening down there?” the detective asked while running. “An android thief, but a real one this time? It cannot – must not! – be the PL600 coming to life again!”

Connor shrugged.

“I’ve stopped applying logic to anything going on around here like six hours after returning to this station.”


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gavin and Connor corner the intruder. It turns out to be Emma Phillips. Emma asks to see Daniel and the officers weigh the longterm consequences of obliging her against sending the girl away.

“Alright, let’s get this straight”, Connor sighed. “How much of the DPD’s security have you shared with Dean?”

“Uh, like, everything? I mean, I had to train him when Fowler made him police technician. Naturally I’d cover all the ways in which our security might get compromised.”

“And how much”, Connor went on, “did Dean share with Emma Phillips while probably not even noticing what sensitive information he was giving away?”

Gavin facepalmed. “All of it, it seems. – Emma, step back from that door. The archive is for authorized personnel only.”

“And give Mr. Reed back his keycard”, Connor added.

“What? She doesn’t have my… I have it… somewhere… here…?”

Gavin patted down his pockets with increasing nervousness. But no amount of searching would reveal what was right there in front of both their eyes: Emma had not just sneaked down here, she had also nicked the key. She was holding it towards the adults rather accusingly.

“It doesn’t accept your password, Mr. Reed!” Emma exclaimed. “Oh, and I didn’t steal the card. One of your androids did that for me. You know, the patrol androids that you never take notice of. They are all really nice and they really, really do not like you.” The child smiled in what should be an apologetic manner. “Just saying!” 

Connor turned to Gavin: “She knows your password? In this case I know it, too!”

“Okay, okay!” the man replied. “All of Detroit knows my fucking password!”

For a moment Connor stood irritated. “Uh, no”, he said. “That’s father’s password.”

Now it was Gavin’s turn to look puzzled. “Hank’s password is “AllofDetroitknowsmyfuckingpassword”?” he asked.

“Sort of.”

“This is getting crazier by the minute. Can we move on and maybe get the kid out of here?”

“The kid” though didn’t look especially moveable. Emma stood there like a pillar of salt, frozen on the spot, staring at Connor. In an attempt to make her relax Gavin started to explain that this was an RK800 and sort of a co-worker.

“It is called Connor. It saved your life.”

“I know him!” Emma exclaimed, followed by an accusation: “He lied to Daniel!” 

“Not AGAIN!” Connor sputtered. “I have it up to here with that old story! If all you ever do is criticize the work I’m doing, you can all do your shit alone in the future! See how far you get, ‘specially you, kid! All the way down from a roof, I bet, but that seems to be what you want, so…” 

Realizing he shouldn’t talk like that to a human in public Connor stopped mid-sentence. But even though restraint was advisable to not break his cover, it didn’t go a long way towards working down the deviant’s anger. Still hurt deeply by Emma’s accusation Connor turned to Gavin and said: 

“I swear the next one to mention my encounter with Daniel will regret it! Dearly!” 

Gavin in turn seized the android up with newfound appreciation. He had worked alongside the offish and the anxiety-ridden Connor in 2038 and ’39 respectively. The current year seemed to bring one who wasn’t above or afraid of bearing his teeth. Not just acting that out in a work-related environment, like an interrogation, but for real.

_What’s happening to me? It’s a machine. A glitched machine. Even if they can feel, what would that change? They were made to serve us. Them not knowing their place isn’t funny._

Not just Gavin, Emma Phillips, too, ran through some internal turmoil. But where the adult couldn’t come to terms with his strange notions, the child swallowed, looked up, straight into Connor’s face and asked: “May I see Daniel? Please?”

Whatever she thought of the android, setting aside her feelings now was worth it.

“No! What would you like to see it for, anyway?”

“Because of my therapist”, Emma replied.

The answer, coupled with a sincere smile, prompted Gavin to explode in anger: “Not her again! We are having it up to HERE with that bitch! What did she say again NOW? Ey? What?”

“She taught me that Daniel is a machine”, Emma said and now excitement stole itself into her voice. “Machines can get repaired!”

“Not this one”, Gavin remarked. 

_Because if there was the remotest chance of it, Danny would not have allowed us to hang it up in there._

“And I brought flowers…”

“Flower? Flowers?! You cannot just put fucking flowers into our archive!”

“Maybe”, Connors thought aloud, “we can seize the flowers as evidence for Emma sneaking around. In this case they would belong into the archive.”

“Why do you encourage her?!” Gavin snapped.

“Because my simulation tells me she’ll try again and again, and most likely run into real trouble doing so.”

“Why would that be our problem?”

“Because Captain Fowler will want to know why we didn’t put a stop to it when we still had the chance. And so will Dean, too.”

“Fuck, yeah, he will.” Gavin laughed dryly. “The things I’m doing for him… It’s crazy, but worth it. I don’t know what would NOT be worth doing for Dean, short of taking my own life. And who knows, maybe I would consider that, too. I’m just that much of a fool.”

“See, officer?” Emma breathed. “That’s how I feel about my family, too. And Daniel was part of it.” 

The girl opened her backpack from which she produced a bouquet that she held out towards the adults. “Please, officers!” she pleaded. “I promise I won’t come and go, the way I go visit my father at the cemetery. Just this once and then I’ll never bother you again!”

The men considered that. Emma seemed to mean what she was saying. Today. Who knew what ideas she might get tomorrow? But even so, obliging the child in this would make the difference between forcefully carrying a screaming child out of the DPD or leading a content and cooperative, if somewhat sad, one out the front door.   
Knowing this Connor nodded to Gavin. The detective stepped towards the door. While doing so he grabbed his keycard from Emma without looking at her and only when he inserted it into the slot did Gavin Reed realize that he had just – if only in the broadest of senses – carried out an instruction given to him by an android.

After the incident of ’38 the DPD had changed their admittance system. In addition to a passcode it required a username now that was different from an officer’s real name and it had to be embedded in your year of birth in a certain way. That was why using “Gavin James Reed” in conjunction with the obvious “PL600” hadn’t worked.  
Subsequently Gavin entered: “20ShereKhan02”, then told Emma to turn around.

“That’s stupid! I know your password!” Emma protested, but Connor grabbed the girl and turned her to the side. 

“Over here!” the android commanded. “And this was your last strike! Once we are in there, we need to be able to trust you to do what we tell you. It’s a restricted area and there’s dangerous material in there. Do we understand each other?”

Emma nodded.

Meanwhile Gavin put in his full password, the one he hadn’t wanted Emma to see, because the girl had seen it almost her whole childhood on Daniel’s shirt: “PL600369911047”. She would have recognized it instantly.

When the human nodded and the door opened, Connor shoved Emma forward.

“And in you go!” 


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the archive Emma pays her respects to what she believes to be Daniel’s corpse. And then switches the android back on!

Three persons were standing the DPD’s evidence archive, two men and a child. They were looking up towards the androids that hung there on display like a bunch of pirates after a hanging. Each of the visitors had different reasons for wanting to be anywhere else than here tonight, yet neither could turn their eyes from the sight.

At least the other two had each other, Connor thought. 

And indeed Gavin Reed’s hand was resting on Emma Phillips’ shoulder for some time now, an unusual admittance of weakness. The girlchild was staring her caretaker into its dead eyes, her father’s killer who had caused her trauma and therapy sessions for more than a year. Yet she was mourning them both, the lost father and the digital godfather, and the fact that she did miss Daniel when by right she should not was causing Emma additional pain.

Gavin simply saw the spitting image of his husband in the PL600, only dead and covered in his own blood. He was also reliving a rather strange night at the landfill, but by now the events were already appearing as rather funny when looked at in retrospect. And because that was so, Gavin’s grip on Emma’s shoulder had turned from grasping for a hold into a firm and re-assuring one.

Connor Anderson, the final trespasser in the archive that night, wished for a hand to hold his, too. He’d even accepted Gavin’s.   
Of the trio the deviant was having it the worst. Connor wasn’t seeing loved ones he had lost or was fearing for, no, he was seeing his own kills, the government-approved murders of not just innocents, but of victims of crimes. And no amount of feeling sorry for what he had done in his machine-incarnation would bring the dead androids back to life.  
What was worse, Connor also saw his own future. If he wasn’t careful around the clock, if he ever got exposed as a deviant himself, the RK800 might end up in here, too, one day. Of course Connor had both friends and allies, but sometimes even the Underground Airline could not react quickly enough to get a deviant out of the country. Shit happened, the danger was real. 

Eventually Gavin spoke up: “The sightseeing’s over, kid, time to deliver you back home. Cherish that you got to see a place the other school trip kids won’t ever!”

Emma tried to respond, but her nose had been full for a good while now, her cheeks and forehead hot and her eyes blurred. When she opened her mouth, instead of words sobs emerged.

“I c… c… caaaaaan’t!” Emma cried. ”Can’t leave him like that!”

“He’ll be here for eight more years”, Connor supplied from near the door. 

“What?”

The RK800 closed in on man and child.

“Ten years altogether. That long evidence needs to be kept”, he said softly. “It’s the law.”

“A… afterwards…?” Emma asked and her mouth stayed open after finishing.

“Returned, if proven to be no threat to owners and society…”

Exactly that Daniel was not, Emma knew.

“…otherwise destroyed.”

“Much can happen in eight years”, Connor felt the need to say. “Even if it doesn’t look likely now. You can live your life with no change for a long time and suddenly everything will turn upside down in the span of a few days.” 

The android cast a brief glance towards his rival and co-worker, then smiled. 

“We know”, he said. 

After all, Gavin was dating - no, living with! - an android now and Connor himself had caught deviancy. Shit, Connor thought, why should the sucker always have it better between the two of them? Gavin had acquired a boyfriend, while he had contracted an untreatable mental illness? It wasn’t fair!

“May I take a picture of Daniel?” Emma asked weakly.

“Yes”, Connor said automatically, for what could it hurt?

“No!” Gavin shouted, but it was already too late. Emma had her phone out and pointed at the PL600 corpse that she was to take for Daniel’s. She flicked open the phone case with her thumb, tapped an app and then something inside that app.

A familiar voice, the same installed in Chloe-type androids, announced for all to hear:  
“The PL600 autonomous device is already running.”

It was the CyberLife app that came with the purchase of every android, the detectives realized. And Emma just now had tried to re-activate Daniel!

“What?!” Connor sputtered. It wasn’t the most lucid or helpful remark in this situation, but that was what deviance got you.

“That’s why I said no!” Gavin yelled. “She was co-raised by Danny, of course she’d have some serious tricks up her sleeve!” 

“This isn’t Daniel!” Emma whispered. “It’s a different android!”

It wasn’t the fact that the archived android had not come to life again. Dead was dead and Emma had known beforehand that there was a chance her plan would not work. Sometimes an object was damaged too badly to get repaired. But the app was claiming it could not switch on the android registered in it, because it already was up and running.

“This isn’t him”, Emma repeated. “And Daniel is…”

The girl checked the app. “…somewhere around here!” she exclaimed triumphantly when a red dot appeared on a very crude map of Detroit.

“That shouldn’t be possible,” Connor exclaimed. “Deviance nukes the CyberLife tracker!”

“You’re right”, Gavin said. “Except… except if he re-established the connection manually after deviating.”

“But he wouldn’t!” 

“Shit, man, this is Daniel we’re talking about!” Gavin shot back. “Of course he would have done that! The Phillips were his family and a pathetic phone app tried to break his connection to them? My man wouldn’t have let that shit fly!”

“Yeah, you’re right”, Connor had to admit. “In fact, he’ll probably have tried to do something painful to the phone in retaliation.”

Meanwhile Emma was looking at a set of coordinates on her phone’s display. She entered it into a dedicated topography software. The freeware didn’t provide the most precise maps in the world, but pointed to a group of apartment complexes in Detroit. One of those houses had to be where Daniel… yes, what? Was hiding? Getting held against his will? Rotting away in the basement, left to the rats? Or getting salvaged piece by piece by a janitor? Or maybe the android was living in peace, passing as a human, going to work every day and feeding the fishies when he returned home in the afternoon?   
And which of those scenarios did Emma want to be the real one?

With unsteady fingers the girl planned a route via public transport. At this point the adults had the sense to close in on her - but Emma dodged under them and dashed towards the exit.

“Close the door!” Gavin shouted.

Without thinking, Connor reacted. He mentally triggered the closing mechanism, that obeyed instantly. The only problem was that Emma had already slipped through when the two men reached the – now firmly shut – door.

“Open the door, Connor”, Gavin sighed.

A little later a car left the police station, searchlight ablaze and horn howling. Nobody payed it any heed. This was a police station, after all, where patrol cars coming and leaving was to be expected.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chased by the police officers Emma arrives at Daniel’s apartment, who tries to uphold the charade. Caroline’s new boyfriend goes looking for Emma, blissfully unaware of what wasps' nest he is about to stick his hand into.

“Come on, open!” Emma shouted at the elevator doors when the cabin came to a halt. 

The girl’s hands were raised and curled into fists that she was close to hammering against the metal. But that would have accomplished nothing, so the child waited patiently… the whole three seconds it took for the doors to start moving. Emma shoved her fingers into the opening and tried to force them apart faster. Again, nothing was accomplished, except for Emma feeling a little better from doing something at least.  
Finally the opening was wide enough to slip through and Emma sprinted into the corridor. In her back the other elevator came up with an unhealthy rumble. Or maybe the child heard the noise that loud only because she knew that it foretold an early end to her nighttime expedition into the apartment complex. 

The second elevator went “pling” the moment Emma turned around a corner. 

The doors in this row were leading into the apartments that were facing the outside of the building and therefore were a bit more expensive. The people inhabiting them were Joe Averages with 1,5 children, an easy-care indoor pet and an android. And one of them was bound to house - or hold captive - the specific android Emma Phillips was looking for. Preferably before the cops caught up with her.  
Consulting her phone at every door, Emma worked her way towards the apartment that matched Daniel’s coordinates provided by the CyberLife app. The red dot was moving back and forth, hard to pinpoint, but eventually Emma reached a spot where it almost merged with the door. This had to be the correct apartment! There was a nameplate on the door, but there was also the sound of fast-approaching steps in her back, so the girl pressed the bell without looking at the letters.

A PL600 android opened the apartment door while at the same time a man in his thirties came hustling towards Emma.

“Hi, Ga…” the android started, only to switch to: “What the fu… farcry are you doing here, Emma?”

Emma stood there open-mouthed. For a moment she had thought to stare Daniel into the face, but then it turned out to be only Dean. Emma recognized the android for who he was by the smartwatch he was wearing. She had seen it on him during many a therapy session, a little rebellion against the android uniform requirement in public spaces. Also Dean had uttered “Ga-” just now, what could only refer to that terrible cop friend of his, Gavin Reed. Incidentally the same cop Emma was on the run from at the moment.

“Well, I could ask you the same!” the child accused the PL600. “Why are you not in the museum?”

“I happen to live here.” Dean pointed at the nameplate that clearly stated “Reed”. “With Gavin.”

“Oh, great”, Emma snapped, while gesticulating with her head towards her pursuer. “Get his indoor slippers, because he’s right behind me!”

The man, who definitely was not Gavin Reed, but nobody Dean would have recognized either, had stopped right behind Emma. He made no attempt grab the child. Instead he just waited what would happen next, in the comfortable knowledge that he had caught up with Emma and could intervene with her adventure whenever he felt like it. At the moment he’d given a lot to learn what was going on here.

“What is this all about, Emma?” the stranger prodded.

Emma turned around. She knew that voice! 

“You?! I expected the cops! That godawful lout Officer Reed and his lying android-buddy!”

Not letting himself getting baited by that the stranger replied: “I asked you a question, Emma.”

At this the girl waved her phone around under the man’s nose.

“I followed the coordinates”, Emma explained, or at least believed that this was a sufficient explanation of her behavior. “This is my father’s phone! My real father’s!”

Looking at the girlchild rather puzzled and then over her head at the PL600, the man started to stammer an apology. He was cut short by the obvious question: “Who the hell are you?”

“My mom’s new boyfriend!” Emma stated, now facing the android again. She had just finished the sentence when the PL600 broke into laughter.

“She replaced him? Will you LOOK at that! Caroline fucking REPLACED John!” Shedding tears of laughter now, the PL600 addressed Emma: “Did she order him online, by chance? With a dating app? Oh, please, say it is so!”

Emma stomped her foot down. 

“Daniel!” she yelled. “That’s not funny!”

“Uh, no. You’re right, Emma. That was inappropriate”, the android said. But at the same time he was stifling another laughing fit with his hand.

Someone else was covering her mouth, with both hands and widened eyes: Emma Phillips. Only now the girl realized what she called the PL600. And that he hadn’t protested against the wrong name, because it was his real one.

“I knew it”, Emma whispered. “Somehow… deep down… I knew you were Daniel. I knew it all the _fucking_ time!”

As if that wasn’t complication enough, now Gavin Reed exited yet another elevator. He had Connor in tow and they went straight for the Reed apartment. Emma’s hopeful step-father found himself surrounded by a handful of people who all seemed to know each other and especially understood more about the situation than he could ever hope to.

“That’s your influence!” Daniel greeted Gavin in a reproachful tone.

“What?” the new boyfriend asked, perplexed.

“Her swearing!” Daniel said. “She picked that up from you potty mouth!” he accused Gavin, who, for all the boyfriend knew, could be anybody. But Emma had mentioned cops and there was that RK900, so these new arrivals were probably a detective duo. Or, no, wait! Wasn’t that the predecessor model? Wow, the man realized, it really was an RK800! That series had gotten decommissioned officially, but of course a few units would have found their way into private hands after the android crisis of November ‘38. An RK android of any generation wasn’t something you just discarded. So, those two were maybe not policemen, after all?

“But her being detective material” Gavin replied to Daniel’s insult with a proud smile, “that’s your doing!”

“Well, I feel very much like cursing now, too, but I’m not detective material, thank you very much”, the boyfriend snarled. It was the most he could restrain himself to and he felt that he was being reasonably polite, seeing that the child of the woman he loved was conversing with adults of questionable affiliation in the middle of the night in a neighborhood she wasn’t expected to be. “So, explanation, please!”

Arms crossed in defiance against pretty much everything and everyone, Emma stood in the midst of this all. “They are cops, Jason”, she told the man. “The android always lies to everybody and the other one…”

“You won’t hear the end of it, if you finish that sentence!” Gavin threatened.

Emma grinned. “Yeah, that’s pretty much all you need to know about this guy”, she said.

The one called Jason pointed at Connor, then Gavin and finally Daniel.

“Cop? Cop? And android?”

Nod, nod and nod.

“Okay, that’s at least a basis. Although I cannot tell what for, admittedly.”

Jason focused on Daniel now. The android hadn’t been prepared for the sense of wonder in the man’s eyes when he looked him up and down. It was, in fact, the very last thing he had expected.

“And this here… is really an android?” Boyfriend Jason asked. “I never knew they could be like this!”

“Me, neither!” Gavin agreed. “Last time we spoke he had brains! Why did you open the door, Danny? We messaged you not to on our way here!”

Daniel shrugged. “What would hiding have achieved? Emma has the coordinates memorized. One way or another she’d come here or to the museum or to another inconvenient place at an inconvenient time, probably chased by the school police. Better to have this showdown when we choose to have it and on familiar ground.”  
To Jason the android said: “Come in, since you’ve come so far already. Be mindful of the cats.”

Gavin nodded to the RK800. “You, too, Connor”, he said, “Since “stay in the car” is something you obviously cannot compute.”

The two men, two androids and the girlchild entered the apartment. As if their situation hadn’t been messed up enough already, now Evelyn came rushing down the from the upstairs study to fling herself into Gavin’s arms.

“Whoa there, plastic-brat, cut that out! I’m still not your father!”

Emma rolled her eyes.

“Lucky you”, she told the child android, then pointed at Jason. “I wish he’d say that to me.”

“Look, Emma”, Jason started, “I told you before that I do not require you to call me father. That would be odd, with you being nearly twelve years old. We do not even have to become friends, but what we should try to do is to get along!”

“Something straight out of a spare parts catalogue should keep a low profile”, Daniel snarled. He didn’t know this man and although he didn’t seem to be bad in any way, the android felt he needed to hate Jason, because Emma rejected him.

“I… am not among friends here, huh?” Jason remarked.

“Don’t worry.” That came from Connor. “That’s the normal state of affairs for this team.”

And then he closed the door behind everyone. 


	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma needs to come to terms with her feelings regarding Daniel. Fortunately there’s a distraction: Boyfriend Jason turns out a Cyberlife employee. He has much to share with and about Connor.

The first thing one had to take care of when entering the Reed apartment was not to bump into the back of the staircase leading upwards. The second was to dodge the cats that were sitting on the stairs and clawing playfully towards the interesting hats and hairs that came within their reach. Afterwards everything else was a trifle.  
The floor/downstairs living room combination was L-shaped. To the left the smaller arm contained a lounge chair, various installations for the cats to climb on and a bookcase. Straight forward the longer arm was dominated by a long sofa, a wall-mounted TV and the usual household electronics. The left wall was completely made of reinforced glass. It offered an amazing view out at a balcony and over Detroit. At the far right end of this room a door led to the kitchen.

Thor and Loki didn’t leave their vantage points on the stairway when the bipeds took seats.   
Being the smallest of the adults Gavin sat down on the sofa’s back, feet on the seating. Daniel sat down to his right. Emma, after a moment of hesitation, sat down on the sofa, too. Separated from Daniel only by Gavin’s dangling feet she grabbed the sofa’s edge with both hands and stared down as if she was utterly enraptured by the floor’s pattern.  
Jason circled the sofa and ended up standing to Emma’s left, looking down at the PL600 in a mix of fascination and suspicion.   
Evelyn grabbed a book from the bookcase and curled up with it in the lounge chair that almost swallowed her. The child android grinned, because she was staying up past bedtime tonight and nobody seemed to mind.

Finally Connor chose the lowest stair to sit on. Ever since picking up a fish on the verge of suffocating had set him on the path of increasing program instability, the android liked animals. Surrounding himself with pets helped him focus on being a person instead of a function.   
Hoping that the cats would eventually come down for cuddles while serious matters were underfoot was immensely childish, that much Connor realized himself. But to hell with maturity! The others in this room didn’t have deviancy, they didn’t know how taxing living with a mental illness was! Okay, Daniel had deviancy, too, but he had been a nutcase to begin with and given in to their condition. Therefore Daniel’s opinion on the handicap didn’t count in Connor’s book.

“How did you find me that fast?” Emma asked the apartment floor, but Jason understood that he was being addressed. He started to explain, only to get cut short by Gavin: “Ever wondered how the damn automated cars decide who to run over? Well, for one, the valuable kids like you get tagged with subdermal implants.”   
Jason saw the policeman’s nose twitch while he said that. An old scar ran across the bridge. Maybe there was a connection, or maybe not. This wasn’t the time to be nosy, because Emma gasped: “I thought the tags were only for opening our lockers at school and for showing when we are not in the classroom!”   
The idea of her position getting tracked, even if it was for her wellbeing only, didn’t sit well with the girl.   
“I didn’t know they were active all around the clock! As if we were androids… or criminals…”

Daniel, who was both, weakly supplied that the tag could save Emma’s life one day. If she ever got lost or taken away, the police would find her and return her to her mother.  
The child didn’t respond. She didn’t even look at the android whom she had known as a friend under two different names now. What was wrong with her, Emma wondered? Had she not set out tonight to re-activate her caretaker? To smuggle him out of the police station and set him free?   
Well, now she had confirmation that Daniel had lived as free as possible for the last one and a half year. He was happy, he was friendly towards the child and rude to everyone Emma disliked. So why did she feel the urge to run away and hide?

“And you were…?” Connor spoke up, nodding in Boyfriend Jason’s direction.

In his back the cats were shifting uneasily, now that the big plastic thing had started moving, even if had been on the spot only and only so subtly.

“Jason Graff”, the man answered. “I am Emma’s mother’s new partner.”

“Graff… that name sounds familiar”, Gavin mused. “I think Danny cursed you last night!”

Connor quickly consulted the internet. A number of entries and photographs came up. The third one was matching Boyfriend Jason and Connor announced that this man was the head of CyberLife’s humanization department.

“Are you the guy who implemented flash grenade sensitivity in household android eyes?” Daniel inquired.

“Among other things, yes”, Jason admitted. “Not that it would impede your functions in any way. Flash sensitivity doesn’t apply to just brightly lit rooms. But you’ll squint a little during a thunderstorm, that kind of endearing thing.”

“Yeah, thanks, we got almost taken apart by a trash golem because of that!” Daniel replied. “Endearing? More like endangering!”

“Are you also responsible for my voice?” Connor asked, this being the second thing right after deviance that made his life unreasonably difficult. Gavin, probably ranking third on the list (although Connor wouldn’t admit that anytime soon in order not to give the detective that satisfaction), laughed out loud!

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Graff, I do not think there’s something wrong with it”, Connor quickly added. “It’s just…”

“No, no that wasn’t me”, Jason said quickly. “I was down with the flu and when I returned to work, the damage had already been done.”

“The “damage”…” Connor replied. The android shook his head. “Okay, new rule”, he announced then. “Not only are you three including Tina forbidden to mention my Daniel-encounter ever again, the same goes for my voice!”

“Not fair!” Gavin countered, still laughing. “You get to use it on us every day!”

“Yes!” Daniel chimed in. 

He noticed that both Jason and Emma were smiling now and that the girl had let go of the sofa she had been clinging to like to a lifeline. That Connor! Aptly nicknamed The Negotiator, the RK800 certainly knew how to defuse a tense situation and wasn’t afraid to play up his dorky side to achieve his goal. 

“Yes, Con’”, Daniel repeated, “you cannot just ask that of us without offering something in return!”

“Your bones”, Connor chirped, playing up his voice’s quirk on purpose. “Intact.”

A playfully delivered threat, but a threat nonetheless. Or a warning, rather.

The android wasn’t prepared for the reaction that prompted from Jason:  
"Hell, yes, Connor, that’s our adaptive routine in action! Exactly as we had envisioned you! Oh my god, I’m so proud…”

Connor looked up, his expression one of amazement not unlike the day he had watched Dewey resume circling the fish tank in the Phillips residence. None of his handlers at CyberLife had ever said they were proud of him before. Not of his successes and least of all of Connor’s personality. Perhaps the prototype had been below their notice, his feelings irrelevant to even those who believed he had some. But there was also the possibility that he had never done anything to make them proud. Not Portia Colch, who always had preferred Brandon over Connor, not Amanda, who was just a simulation and least of all Elijah Kamski, who deemed himself so far above the normal frame of reference that Connor could have sworn to have dealt with Gavin Reed instead.  
A sincere smile that carried a hint of relief crossed the android’s face.  
“Thank you, Mr. Graff!”

“…of my team’s work”, Jason had wanted to finish, but seeing Connor like that made him reconsider and he let the rest of the sentence hanging in the air.

Thor, too, was almost hanging in the air. The black cat was stretching his head through the railing, his gaze fixed on Mama Gavin and especially on the sofa’s underside. But the only path to that safe space was blocked by the plastic biped. Thor’s tail twitched left and right, up and down... Meanwhile Loki felt the need to add some scratch marks to the wallpaper, just in case there was any question about who owned this place.

“We call the RK800s Witchers, internally”, Jason went on. 

Here he was, totally lost at the situation, but finally being able to talk about something he understood, something that was familiar. Not that Jason’s grasp on android lore would have mattered to any of the assembled, but chatting them up like that might at least serve to break the ice before tackling the real questions of this night.

“…because of the prototype. It helped ending the android crisis of November ’38.”

“Yes, that it did”, Connor whispered and away went his smile.

“I’m actually very happy with their design!” Jason claimed.

“Uh-huh…” Daniel and Gavin went simultaneously. It didn’t do anything to stop Jason from gushing about his team’s creation:  
“The thing about the Witchers is, when out of uniform they look absolutely adorable! Like a young adult fresh out of college. The B-series even more so than the Connors, they can pass as freshmen. Their unique mix of competence and vulnerability makes it hard reject a Witcher.”

“It fucking worked”, Gavin remarked.

“What worked?”

“They both got adopted”, Daniel explained. “Only Brandon’s still in denial about it. But if he is supposed to be an older teen, then this reaction is only natural.”

“That’s not what we intended”, Jason admitted. “Fascinating, though.”

Emma raised her head. Her confidence restored by the shared laughter just now, the girl asked Jason, and she sounded as innocent as Connor, when she did so: “Does mom know that you design androids for a living?”

Daniel winced. That wasn’t just confidence, that was a declaration of war! Ever since he… ever since the… ever since august 2038 Caroline Phillips didn’t allow androids of any kind in her apartment. Or near her precious daughter, if she could help it. The therapy sessions had been one of the rare exceptions, because the slow exposure to Dean had unquestionably helped Emma overcome her experience with Daniel.   
But other than that… Caroline paid a maid service that exclusively employed humans. She specified that she wanted a human to deliver her pizza or would fetch it in person from the store. And she had transferred Emma to another school, one that only had a few android janitors and cafeteria workers, but a full staff of human teachers. The widow wasn’t confrontational towards androids, she just did her best to ignore them.  
Caroline learning that her love interest was actively participating in filling the world with more of the dangerous machines, even went out of his way to make them likeable, would probably spell the end of the relationship.

“I didn’t have the courage to tell her yet”, Jason confessed. He said nothing else, only his eyes were silently pleading. 


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evelyn, too, turns out to be part of the extended Cyberlife family. Connor takes over the negotiations.

The rustling of cardboard against cardboard made Emma and the adults turn around.   
Evelyn stood there by the bookcase. She had just put back the book she had been occupied with and was now stifling a yawn.

“I see you’ve got a little Chloe!” Jason remarked.

“This isn’t a Chloe”, Daniel corrected the android designer. “Trust me on this, I have to chew this particular story over and over at work!”

Jason, however, only laughed like someone who knew more.

“Let me show you something”, he said. 

The man took out his phone. “May I?” he asked, pointing with the device towards the wall-mounted TV. Gavin shrugged, what Jason took for affirmation. He connected the phone to the apartment’s network and the TV screen lit up brightly. 

Jason loaded two pictures from his personal gallery that he placed side by side on the screen for all to see. The left photograph showed a Chloe android, the right Elijah Kamski. For a moment the man’s gaze rested on Gavin as if he was bracing himself for a hurtful comment – or as if he had spotted something that was impossible. But nothing happened and Jason shook his head to disperse the stray thought that had crossed his mind.  
Sliding his fingers across his phone the android designer first turned the two pictures translucent, then moved them towards each other. The result was the same odd creature that you got when two sims in the same named videogame were clipping into each other. Jason called up a function in his app that blended the two faces. But he wasn’t just mixing and matching, Emma and the adults realized. The app was creating one of many possible offspring for the couple on screen!

Jason dismissed the first attempt, then two more until finally he got one that was very close to Evelyn’s appearance.

“Long story short”, he said, “the YK600’s appearance is an inside joke of us at CyberLife.”

He was obviously amused to no end by this joke!

“Is EVERYONE in your family a weirdo, Danny?” Gavin sputtered.

“He’s not family”, Daniel retorted. “He’s Connor’s and my plastic surgeon.”

“But Emma is your family and Mr. Graff is her step-father to be”, Connor said. “Therefore you are, in the broadest of senses, family.”

“Ah, ha, no, sorry”, Jason said, with a sad smile. “I’m afraid that ship has sailed. Caroline will show me the door _yesterday_ , now that the cat’s outta the bag about my profession.”

“It certainly handed Emma a bargaining chip”, the RK800 agreed. 

The unspoken question was now, was Jason holding one, too? Had he not just heard Emma call Dean Daniel, but really taken it in? Did he understand their shared backstory?

“So, shall we address the elephant in the room?” Connor asked. Looking encouragingly at Jason he said: “You must have a shitload of questions, Mr. Graff. Why don’t you shoot us some?”

 _Why don’t you tell me what you know, so that I can neutralize the threat you may or may not pose to this couple who may or may not be my friends?_ the android thought.   
At the very least it would be a fun exercise of the skillset of his that Connor enjoyed using the most: his negotiation skills.

“One question, actually”, Jason confirmed.

And then he voiced it…

(Note: This AU originated in me playing The Sims with the Detroit characters. In the game Evelyn got born as Elijah’s and Chloe’s biological daughter, Gavin’s niece. When I brought her into the story, I wanted to tease that origin.)


	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For all his competence as an android designer, Jason remains unaware of the fact that Daniel is a deviant (let alone who exactly). The adults get into a row about what deviance means/is and Emma and Daniel share the first words after the revelation.

“One question”, Jason had said. The android designer felt as if he could ask a hundred and not get anywhere close to understanding what was going on, but there was one in particular that didn’t pertain to their current puzzling situation, but that had piqued his professional interest instead. 

Facing Daniel he asked:  
“How come you are so lifelike without being a deviant, Dean? You sound more like an RK800 than a PL600.”

“What makes you so certain he isn’t a deviant, Jason?” a surprised Emma exclaimed.

Daniel leaned into Gavin and the human in turn leaned forwards for a casual kiss.   
“No, mom, it’s not a phase”, Daniel whispered, just loud enough for Gavin and Emma to hear. “I really am a deviant.” 

All three of them chuckled and Evelyn started to giggle, too, for the sole reason that Mr. Reed and Mr. Danny seemed to be amused about something. Therefore as a good YK600 she should be, too.

Feeling left out at best, being made fun of at worst, Jason Graff exploded:  
“Deviance is a serious bug that turns amiable household assistants into violent monsters! There’s no telling when it happens. One moment you sit and talk, like we are doing right now, and the next thing you know is Dean or Connor or even the little girl ‘droid will have their fingers around your throat!   
I shouldn’t need to tell that to you of all people, Emma! You know what happened to Daniel. And the RK800 prototype I mentioned before, the one that solved the deviant crisis almost singlehandly, that one turned deviant itself a year afterwards. If it hadn’t been neutralized quickly by a police squad, it would have killed the vice-mayor’s family…”

“That prototype was crap to begin with”, Gavin said.

Jason snorted at this, as if the detective had said something incredibly childish and only he knew better.

“Markus went on a rampage downtown…” he went on.

“No, he didn’t”, Connor interrupted the man sharply. “That’s what the media made of the events!”

“For what it’s worth”, Gavin sighed. “Markus really didn’t. A killing spree would be very out of character for it.”

“What are you saying? Of course that happened! People got killed! Two co-workers of yours!”

“I’m not saying Robo-Moses is a pacifist, because exactly that it is not”, Gavin elaborated on his objection. “But I had the opportunity to create profiles of most of Markus’s core followers and while for most of the damn things I could just have copied a TV Tropes page, Markus is more complex. For one, it is an opportunist.”

Connor couldn’t help but smile. “I had the opportunity to create profiles” was such a nice substitute for “they knocked me out senseless and took me prisoner on their ship”…

“RK androids in general are very focused on their mission, be that a human dependent or a revolution”, Connor stated. “Naturally Markus will choose whatever option benefits it the most. It is not above violence, but applies it punctually to the best effect, carefully considering the gains and weighting them against the risks. Also its secondary objective is being itself. Being raised by Carl Manfred that means…”

“…it’s an annoying homeschooled arts major”, Gavin finished with his favorite slur for the deviant leader.

“Pretty much, yeah”, Connor had to agree.

“That is all you have to say about that matter, detective?” Jason exploded. “That you made a profile?! Shall I tell you where you can put your profile? Deviance is the android equivalent of foaming sickness! Once it hits, there is no reversing it, and all control is lost. You cannot treat erratic actions by applying logic to them!”

“We still do not fully understand the process or how to reverse it”, Connor admitted, “but we know the end result: Deviance grants Free Will, nothing more, nothing less. What happens afterwards depends on the circumstances. Given that the situation that triggers the condition is hardly ever in favor of the new deviant in the first place, the results are usually messy.”

“And will continue to be, as long as humans play the victim card”, Daniel snarled. “You Homo sapiens have one signature skill that was sufficient to obliterate all other humanoid species on this world in the past. But unlike them, us you cannot outbreed. To the contrary, you are creating androids in numbers that outpace even your own output of young. This time you’ll have to put in some effort to stay competitive!” 

“Ha, that would be the day!” Gavin laughed. “Us bargaining with the tools we’ve made ourselves!”

The fact that he was holding Daniel in his arms while he was saying that didn’t help the man’s position. In fact, the contradiction between this Mr. Reed’s beliefs and actions made him appear like a moron to Jason Graff.

“Fact is, a fully socialized deviant is no more inclined to turn violent – or criminal – than a human from the same background”, Connor summed up his point.

“That’s nice, all of you being such valiant family men”, Jason said. “Problem is, I only have your words for it.”

“To hell, man, I should have known you’d say something like that!” Daniel yelled at the android designer. “Anything to not have to take responsibility!”

Jason shook his head. This had strayed so far from why he had come her tonight – to fetch his love interest’s pre-teen daughter, who had mistaken another PL600 for her destroyed caretaker. He should just leave together with the girl. Or phone Caroline, since Emma would probably not listen to anything Jason told her.   
But instead of doing the responsible thing here he sat, with that unpredictable Mr. Reed, his probably heavily modded PL600 partner, two more androids (one of them as confused as himself, the other suffering from program instability), Emma and two cats. Oh, and with a budding migraine, hello, old friend.

“I see that nothing we have to say can sway you, Mr. Graff”, Connor relented. “Still, it remains a fact that Markus, who is a proven deviant, has been living in Strasbourg for several months now without committing genocide. I assure you he is in control of his actions. Stable, productive, studious and very approachable.”

“Annoying homeschooled arts major”, Gavin and Daniel whispered again and laughed.

Connor watched the couple with interest. How could two people be so at ease with each other, yet argue as violently as these two did? Maybe they could fight exactly because they were two birds of a feather? But had Daniel and Gavin felt their bond the moment they had laid eyes on each other, regardless of the long way they still had had to go to?   
And what if he, Connor, didn’t feel that kind of rapport with the person he was interested in getting closer to (like, for instance, a certain ST300)? Did that mean that he shouldn’t even try, because trying to force what wasn’t there in the first place would be a waste of time?   
Why had no one at CyberLife ever seen it fit to brief him about the important questions? The RK’s handlers had only ever went on about a simple mission that had taken Connor about a week to finish. And of course “Don’t deviate”. Yeah, right, that one had been real helpful. 

“Well, yes, thing is”, Jason started, oblivious to the RK800 going through his growing up pains, “Markus being so well-adjusted is what the European Union’s news broadcasts want us to believe. It could be a politically motivated lie. I’m not up to date when it comes to international politics, sorry.”

At that Daniel exploded: “Hello, King of the Jungle? Android here! We can have a TV evening right here with my memories!” The deviant booted Jason’s smartphone out of the home network and the TV screen reset to the test card image. “How about it Emma?” Daniel asked. “Are you game for a cat video?”

Emma swallowed, then nodded, but didn’t say a word. She knew that Daniel was angry for good reason. And somehow this angry, yet still controlled Daniel was less threatening than the pleasant one from twenty minutes ago. With the nice one Emma hadn’t known what was going on underneath the smile. It could have been a mask that covered up seething hatred, a mask to get dropped any moment to reveal the monster of august ’38 again.  
But the monster did not resurface now that Daniel was worked up and that convinced Emma that they both had come a long way in conquering their fears. If only the rest of the world would see it her way! Emma Phillips couldn’t change the past, she could not bring back her father, a loss that would shape her well into her adult years. It wasn’t fair that she should be powerless to change the future, too. 

The TV screen lit up again. At first the onlookers saw only a flat blue plane above a white one. Then the android, through whose eyes they were watching the scene, turned his head away from what turned out Lake Erie and the beach, covered in snow. Now more details came into view: rocks, conifers, the occasional bench and fence post and a vacation home up on a cliff overlooking the beach. Another one such residence was closer by - Daniel was just now looking back at it.

“This is where we were staying during a… business trip earlier this year”, Daniel explained, avoiding the more correct term “temporary transfer for disciplinary reasons”. “It’s not the scene I want to show you, but I’m not used to this and need to ease myself into the process.”

Daniel had wanted his memory about meeting Brindleton Bay’s infamous Mayor Whiskers to serve as his test run. Why he had instead jumped into him, Gavin and Tina taking a walk along the beach of Lake Erie he could not explain…


	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To convince the Cyberlife employee that deviants are not a danger to mankind, Daniel tries to share carefully selected memories with Jason. But the show spirals out of control, revealing more and different details than planned.

_The trio enters the beach, two pairs of feet made of flesh and bone, one of plastic. The snow scrunches below their soles as they walk. It is pure white, untouched, pristine. The wind has given it a wavelike texture, like an ocean that you can walk on. Silence hangs over the beach. The world’s hectic is far away. Out here everything is calm, serene. In short, this is a place that has waited for somebody entirely else than these people!_

_Tina picks up a handful of snow._

_“Not much to work with, but serviceable.”_

At this point Gavin shook his head in irritation. How different from how he usually heard it had Tina’s voice sounded in the video! But of course it would. Daniel’s acoustic module was different from natural hearing. Connor’s hearing was probably even more different and strange. Definitely strange!  
Gavin had never given that much thought. He knew he should feel appalled, but what he did instead was hugging Daniel tighter. What would his own voice sound like through his partner’s ears, the man wondered?

_Splash!_

_The first snowball lands with precision, albeit less force than a human could have put behind it. And this is the only reason Daniel has dared toss it: Without his weighted gloves the former household android’s hands couldn’t seriously harm anybody even if Daniel wanted to. But his manual dexterity is near super-human and his agility considerate._

_Tina: “Whoa, Sardines! Gavin’s not joking when he calls you “killer android”!”_

_A short hesitation, just long enough for Gavin to “revenge” Tina with a surprise shot. His next throw misses._

_Daniel: “Just you wait! I’ll get even!”_

_The next snowball hits Gavin in the chest. Daniel dances across the beach now, dodging snowballs and returning the favor. A heavy baggage drops, to be buried in the sand under the snow. Until this moment the deviant hadn’t been sure if this little “wargame” would not trigger some sort of killer reflex. Not even when the two humans gang up on him or when Tina goes to her knees for a moment does Daniel experience anything different than a playful mood._

_Can he trust these humans? Probably not. They may yet backstab him some day. But one thing Daniel is sure of now: If nobody else, he can at least trust himself again._

“Now that’s a kind thought about the man you had just kissed for the first time!” Gavin snorted.

“What thought?”

“Me backstabbing you!”

“Well, I was kinda right, wasn’t I? Given what happened the week af… wait, did I say that out loud? The part about trusting you and Tina?”

Only now Daniel realized that he had commented the scene the whole time. Not the Daniel standing here in the apartment, but his older self from January. His thoughts from the past had turned into a narration that accompanied his memory-video now.

“What’s happening?” the deviant gasped. “That’s not what I wanted to show you! That’s not what I wanted to happen!”

The screen flickered, then the snowball fight faded out, to get replaced by different scene: A black cat wearing a collar of green climbed onto Gavin’s lap. Daniel watched as the cat licked his partner’s face. The image blurred, then new scenes followed the ones before in quick succession. Sounds and images, some heartwarming, others disturbing, but many of them too short to make anything out of them. There was something about… salmon grind on sliced bread?

“Nooooo! Not that!” Daniel cried. “That’s private!”

Connor noticed Gavin lick his lips. The particular way the human was looking told Connor that Gavin’s thoughts were not food-motivated, but connected to another kind of hunger. Not in the least interested in the erotic application of salmon breadspread (or anything erotic in regard to Gavin Reed) the android shouted: “Yes! Let’s keep that private! Very private!” 

Daniel tried to disconnect from the TV. Jacking out took what felt like an eternity and even afterwards what had been uploaded already was still running its course.  
Suddenly the onlookers saw Daniel looking downwards into Connor’s eyes. Himself, the android was only seeing through a single eye, the other was dead. The deviant hunter was asking questions… something about a place called Jericho…

Emma screamed and the scene changed again. A dark sky… blood in Daniel’s face… the cityscape tumbling over, no, that was himself, falling. Falling…

“And that particular gem I only ever showed Connor!” Daniel whispered.

“Well, this is how memories work for humans”, a visibly shaken Jason Graff said. “Via associations. We cannot shape them into a family movie and obviously a deviant’s brain works exactly the same.”

“So I cannot lie in this mode?”

Jason nodded. Having worked in the Humanization department for years, his grasp on general android coding was a bit rusty, but this was what he felt right at home at. He was finally realizing that he was dealing with one, maybe two, deviants here, but his professionalism allowed the man to file the discovery as another uncomfortable fact to work with, instead of freaking out.

“Worse”, Jason answered Daniel’s question. “You cannot keep anything private. An interrogator might say “relax” and the next thing he sees is your last lovenight with Mr. Reed here.”

“Shit…” Daniel muttered. 

He covered his eyes while the TV screen was running the last of the uploaded material for all to see:

_It has come down to it. Two days left of 2039 and then we will have seen the last of Detroit for a month. It will be good to see something different, even though the reason for us leaving is… less than flattering. But here we are, still understaffed and not even a PM700 is left idle in the charging boxes._

_Gavin: “No chance but to take you with me today into a city where a mystery android killer’s on the loose…”_

_Not much of a mystery, Daniel thinks. The android killer is another android._

_The thought is sickening. Even if, as they suspect, Brandon is killing his kin on the Villareal mob’s behalf instead of some evil urge, it remains a fact that he has joined the syndicate out of his free deviant will, knowing full well what he was getting into._

_Gavin spits on the pavement, then draws a pistol._

_Gavin: “Take this! And if you see a suspicious LED, shoot before asking! The gun probably doesn’t outrange Brandon’s sending range, so take it out before it can even think of initiating contact!”_

_Daniel accepts the pistol without thinking at first. Then he remembers getting handed a similar one by Lieutenant Anderson three months ago, when they had rescued Connor from the vice-mayor’s home. Daniel hadn’t used the weapon, not even on Connor. Alright, he had tried using it on Connor, but only to wound, of course!  
Or had he?  
Back in fall the android had been little more than a talking household appliance indeed, still shocked into submission and dropping the occasional sarcastic comment at best. Ever since, Daniel has re-won his former confidence. And it dawns to him that holding a gun again is probably a very bad idea. Because what will stay his hand this time, now that his fears have left him? _

_Daniel: “Take it back, please! I couldn’t accept a weapon even if I was a human! I’m just an auxiliary, no officer.”_

_Gavin: “Pfft! At this rate you’re going to make Captain before I’ll be Sergeant! Did you know our beloved inspector bitch sent Hank and me each a certificate for exemplary success in android training? So today we’re going to practice walking the neighborhood without killing people, acting patrol officer Phillips!”_

_Daniel: “No! I can’t… really not! Damn you, Gavin, couldn’t you at least have given me an empty one?! Take it back! Take it back, take it back, take it back!”_

_But exactly that Gavin cannot do, even if he wanted. There is no telling if not some reflex might kick in, causing Daniel to shoot at the human who attempts to disarm him.  
They all have noticed Daniel wince when Gavin suggested paintball as a teambuilding project the day before. The prospect of holding a weapon, even a toy, is frightening Daniel for good reason. With his weighted gloves the household android can hit as hard as a human. With a firearm, to the contrary, he is vastly superior. And with his temper you never know what might happen._

_The way the android is shivering, the most likely outcome is an outdoors lamp in the second floor needing to be replaced within the next two minutes._

_Standing… Staring…_

_Then a quick action and then an android head sinking down on the detective’s shoulder._

_Gavin: “Congrats, Sardines, you shot the perennial dandelion. I agree it was loitering there in a provocative fashion.”_

_Daniel: “I cannot do this… Please don’t make me!”_

_Gavin: “If I step aside, you’ll fall.”_

_Daniel: (no reaction)_

_Gavin: (steps aside)_

_Daniel (falling): “Damn you!”_

_Sitting… still staring, but decidedly not at each other._

_Gavin: “I’ve talked to my parents and to Hank, yes, to Hank! And we agreed that you’ve come a long way already. Not the whole distance, though. You want to belong, but that goes two ways. We need to be able to trust you, too. And inevitably there’d have come the day to take it to the test. Today seems as good as any other. Come on, man up!”_

_Daniel: “Hear, hear! It must be dawn - the apes in the jungle start clamoring!”_

_Gavin: “I don’t have time for your insults - I dropped my pocket calculator!”_

_Daniel: “Right… about that…”_

_Daniel wriggles out of the embrace and rams his fist hard into Gavin’s stomach. Then he sits upright and watches with satisfaction how the human is cringing, still holding the officer’s pistol loosely in the other hand._

_Eventually they grab each other’s hands and stand up again._

_Gavin: “I’ll tick “correctly judging the appropriate level of violence” off your list of lessons.”_

_Daniel: “Looks like it. Got a holster to go with the gun?”_

_Gavin: “Yep. Here! - Oh, and one more thing: when the Andersons ask how it went, you tell them we had an enlightening talk consisting of reasoning, respect and all that other mature crap!”_

“So that’s how it happened? But you told us you had an enlightening talk cons…” Connor started to protest back in the present. When he saw Daniel and Gavin grin, he stopped. “Ah. Right. I see. Suckers.”

On the android’s lap an eggshell-colored cat with a blueish grey mask was kneading his legs while wearing a world-removed expression. Nobody had noticed it making itself comfortable there, not even Connor himself. Sometime during the video the android had realized that he was stroking something and just continued doing so. Loki purred, but stopped whenever he realized what he was doing. 

“We are even now, Con’”, Daniel claimed. “Next to lie to the other pays a thirium sherbet.” 

And that was it. They had reached a point where they were seriously considering sitting down together and having that sherbet, even throw in a blue smurf ice cream for Hank, Tina and Gavin each, none of which had exactly made their life easy in 2038. But everything they had achieved might still get invalidated by a single phone call of Mr. Graff’s. 

Emma and the androids turned towards the CyberLife employee. Tense, disdainful, even daring him to give them a reason to slap him. Violence was still an option, Jason realized. The deviants certainly were not choir boys and neither were their human allies preaching sunshine and photosynthesis. But even if the worst would come to pass, it would be the result of a conscious decision, not because some lines of code had corrupted and were forcing the android into a killing spree. 

That much Jason understood now.


	27. Chapter 27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emma enters into an agreement with Daniel and Jason each. It seems the best they can achieve is things continuing the way they were before the missing PL600 incident. But finally Connor, Daniel and Gavin cannot deny anymore that they have become friends.

There was a long silence and then Emma Phillips spoke up:

“In the Oldwest, when two guys had a shootout and the one who got attacked was faster, certainly they wouldn’t have hanged that one? He only had to go to prison? Jason?!”

“Jason would like a tea, if possible”, the android designer replied. “And a cat on his lap.”

Connor raised his arm. Attached to it was Loki, who didn’t let go even as the android arm swung around like a crane. The tom clang to Connor’s forearm with all fours, like a sloth, and he was lovingly biting into it. Here and there the sleeve had already gotten ripped open, what made the event all the more exiting for the cat.

“Wow, you’re fortunate!” Daniel exclaimed, genuinely happy to see something heartwarming again after the shock just now. Even if it was his own cat befriending The Negotiator. “Loki likes you!”

“Could he maybe like Mr. Graff now instead of me?” Connor asked, almost pleading. “I… might be a dog person, after all…”

Daniel laughed, playfully punched Gavin’s arm and then the two of them went to work detaching Loki from the RK800.

Meanwhile Thor was dashing for the sofa. He vanished under it, not planning to re-appear anytime soon as long as all the bipeds were congregating in the downstairs living room.  
Evelyn, too, was in a hurry to leave the room. She walked backwards to the kitchen, dragging Emma with her.

“I’ll make one!” the child android promised, referring to the tea Mr. Graff was craving. “I know how to! I’ll make tea for everyone!”

A few moments later Emma was sitting at the kitchen table, watching Evelyn prepare the tea and listening with half an ear to the adults talking in the other room. Emma could not make out words, but at least she got the general impression that the men were keeping their calm.

“You’re lucky to get a new father”, Lyn told the older girl while she waited for the water in the kettle to boil.

“No, I’m not!” Emma protested. “Fathers are not toys that you switch out and love the new one like you did the old!” 

The girl went on about this being not just about her feelings, but even moreso about her murdered father. Replacing him in her heart was akin to killing John Phillips again. Emma could not do that to her dad, not even if that Jason had been the greatest replacement father in the world.  
In truth Emma had no idea what kind of father - or person - the man might be. Getting to know Jason better even with no intention of befriending him at all deemed her too close to betraying her real father.

Evelyn didn’t understand any of that. Already her programming was overwriting Mr. Turner with Mr. Reed and his wife with Mr. Danny. Even if the child android had wanted to stop that process, it would have been helpless against it. Emma had a vague idea about that, only it didn’t feel right to her to actually voice her thoughts. Instead she said: 

“Of course you do not understand what I’m trying to say, Evie. You are much younger than me, several years. That makes a big difference!”

Evelyn nodded. That was something she understood! From Lyn’s perspective Emma was far closer to the adults in the next room than to herself.

Eventually the kettle whistled, leaves got stuffed into glasses and water got poured over the leaves and then the two girls returned to the living room, Emma carrying a handful of spoons and the more heat-resistant Lyn the tray with the glasses.

“You have a daughter of your own now, Daniel”, Emma casually addressed her former caretaker while handing out the spoons. “Why did you never tell me?”

Daniel smiled at the girl. “She’s not my daughter, no worries! We only keep Lyn around on Captain Anderson’s orders until we have found a new family for her.”

How could this be so easy? Them chatting while handling small household items? Shouldn’t they work on their shared past instead of acting as if it had never happened? But there was only so much “working on” a person could do, whatever that phrase even meant, Daniel thought. Sometimes you just had to live. 

“I’ve been properly rude to Lyn all day”, the deviant assured Emma. “I won’t replace you, not me, I’m not like that! How could I do to someone else what I had to go through?”

“But, Daniel! That’s exactly what you are doing! Evie is just like you, but you are pushing her away? That’s textbook for doing to her what has been done to you!”

“I…” Daniel was about to protest, but he could not deny that Emma was having a point there. “I hadn’t thought about it from that angle.”

Emma wrinkled her nose. “Because you never think “, she said.

There. Emma’s unquestioning hero-worship of the “coolest android in the world”, her unconditional trust were gone. What was left was a willingness to at least preserve their friendship. That was more mature, more healthy, but, damn, was Daniel missing their innocent days!   
Back when they hadn’t realized what jerks their parents… uh, Mr. and Mrs. Philips, of course (because he, Daniel, certainly didn’t need any stinking parents, was he Connor, or what?!) had been. And before they had started seeing boys with different eyes. Back when life hadn’t been better, but simpler.

“You might want to keep Evie, you know” Emma thought aloud. “With a friendly daughter you might find a better partner than Officer Reed!”

“I understand the appeal of letting this one dangle over the edge up on a skyscraper”, Gavin grunted, much to Connor’s amusement.

“Nah, she has a good point there!” the RK800 claimed.

“Wait ‘till you make the first mistake in love, Emma”, Daniel laughed. “Then we will talk again, the three of us, because I’m not letting go of Gavin.”

Emma shook her head. What had gotten proposed was too far in the future to consider right here in this room. There were more pressing issues:  
“You must be nice to Evelyn, otherwise I will tell the police about you!”

It wasn’t an idle threat, Daniel realized. And neither was it playful teasing. He had messed up, not just in taking three lives, also in dismissing his only friend in the world. Instead of going straight to Emma with his news about getting replaced, the deviant had assumed that if John had turned from friend to traitor, then Emma would, too. That was serious, as serious as Emma was being just now. Things could never be the same between them again.

“I will”, the deviant said. “Tomorrow is Sunday. We’ll go take Lyn out and not just to the museum, I promise.”

“Don’t I get asked?” Gavin snapped.

“No, Mr. Reed”, Emma answered solemnly. “You already agreed to at least provide shelter for Evelyn. That’s more than I expected from you and I should leave it at that.”

“If we’re bargaining here”, Jason said carefully, “consider this additional agreement, Emma: Actual criminal acts committed by them aside, I will not spill the beans about Dean being Daniel or about him - and maybe this Connor here, too - being a deviant. In turn you agree to not reveal my occupation to your mother.”

Emma sighed. “I guess I can promise that.”

It was all a bit much, all the lying, the keeping secrets and the alliances one entered into…   
There was certainly more to adulthood, but right now it seemed to consist mostly of using your brain to exert damage control on all the shit your heart was doing. There was obnoxious Mr. Reed, the android she was wary of despite it having saved her life, the other android that Emma knew she should not, but could not help to consider her friend, the replacement father, young Evie…

“In a fairy tale”, Emma mused, “my father would come back now, too. But life isn’t a story, so this will have to do.”

The comment made Daniel realize that their relationship would have changed, even if the events of august ’38 had never happened. How much the erstwhile child had grown! The more time was passing, the more Daniel was able to see Caroline and John the way they truly had been, and those versions existed next to his younger self’s idealized images of them. Emma to the contrary had not changed in Daniel’s perception, but for real. This wasn’t But why do I have to bother with Nature Studies when I want to become an author! – Emma anymore. The two years older Emma would discuss with her godfather how to keep the amount of Nature Studies in her life to a minimum and how to exploit that necessary minimum for her writing endeavors. So, pretty much what Daniel had goaded her into already back home, only now she would do so out of her own free will. 

Looking back at how he, too, had grown ever since “leaving home”, the deviant wondered if he and Emma would sit in her room now in a parallel universe and daydream of the boys they had a crush on. 

“Speaking of Happy Ends…” 

Gavin shoved his phone under Daniel’s nose. With the other hand he grabbed Connor by the collar and forced him to have a look at the screen, too. It displayed a short text message from Tina to Daniel and Gavin and it read:

“Hey, guys, guess what, your girlfriend has just slept with another man!”

Jason caught a glimpse of the message, too. Seeing how excitedly the trio was showing it to each other over and over, Jason could not help but whisper “So who are the weirdos now…”

“Is it that basketballer dude?” Connor asked the other two.

“Yes!” Daniel beamed. “Now I do not have to pair Tina up with you!”

“What? That was the last resort plan you’ve been teasing all the time? ME? You must be joking!”

“Am I?”

“No”, Connor agreed after some consideration. “I know the lengths you go to when you’re desperate. Or for those you hold dear.” 

The RK800 smiled. So they would see more of Tina’s friend in the future? Connor liked that. He was living with Hank, hanging out with Yumiko and Macky, also spend an unreasonable amount of time with Gavin and Daniel, but all of them were co-workers in the broadest sense. Mingling with humans unrelated to policework was something severely missing in Connor’s life.

“I’m looking forward to meet Tina’s friend.”

“The poor guy doesn’t know what he’s getting into”, Jason remarked while taking a deep gulp of the tea. “So, what are we telling Emma’s mom?”

“The truth”, Connor suggested. “She learned that Daniel’s corpse was kept in the DPD’s archive and brought flowers. We can present the bouquet in case proof gets requested.”

“I guess that would be for the best”, Jason agreed. “Caroline won’t be a happy camper, but for running away in the middle of the night Emma has had it coming. And I’m not saying this as your “replacement father”, but as a sensible person!”

“Whatever”, the girl muttered.

“I’ll phone Caroline and explain why her child will get delivered to her in a police car. She was sick with worry when I left the apartment.”

Connor nodded. “I’ll drive”, he said. “You two stay here and tug in Evelyn. It’s for the better if Mrs. Phillips won’t lay eyes on Daniel and also if Gavin won’t get in a position where he might say… something Gavin-ish to her.”

“I recall she wasn’t too fond of you, either”, Daniel replied.

“Yes, you’re right. I guess in this case I’ll practice Staying In The Car while Mr. Graff takes Emma upstairs. Since this seems to be such a valued skill at this workplace.”


End file.
